When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this website, because I believe it will offer something of interest to me.
Obviously things don't come for free, somebody has to pay for it, but the issue is that as a user, I didn't agree to getting my attention diverted. The trade isn't done upfront and by the time I see the ad, it's already too late.
There is also a collective argument to me made about humanity browsing like headless chickens and not being able to focus on important things because of all these distractions.
Auto play videos in a modal that can't be closed that start with a video on. Wtf
I think I hate this more than ads, honestly (not all autoplaying videos are ads).
I clicked the link because the title caught my attention. I come to this website because it has a rotation of good content, all of which is more likely than not to catch and hold my attention, keeping it from something else.
I also don't generally agree that all ads are bad, which may put me in the minority
Now, the problem is there's no way to know if it was motivated at all (nor to what extent) by the promise of a referral fee. So it could be noise and not a genuine referral based on intrinsic qualities of the product.
I've advertised things on my blog, using referral codes, because that helps me defray hosting charges (I've largely stopped as the income is far too low in recent years; I've also mostly moved my content to third party sites with open licenses) but they've always been genuine either comparative reviews (which I was doing to help me decide what to get) or recommendations based on something I use. I'm putting that link there anyway, the company might as well pay me if anyone follows it.
"For example I used to use Digital Ocean to spin up a Minecraft server for occasional use, recently I've been using Vultr for the same - it seems substantially cheaper, and there was a good deal on for a free month."
Suppose that true comment had referral links, would it really be intrinsically worse?
We can even go one step further and say there can't be an ad attacking your attention when the page itself doesn't exist at all.
The bulk of the internet wouldn't exist if not for ads. Things like youtube almost certainly could not exist, with how expensive it is to store data, provide bandwidth, develop the site itself. It's only thanks to ads that the internet is where it is today.
The fact that ads got us here doesn't mean that we should uncritically accept that business model going forward.
The author said they "decide to direct my attention to this website" and used "attack" because they "didn't agree to getting my attention diverted."
The useful distinction is between the content you came to the website to direct your attention toward, and things that tear your attention away.
Let me do some advertising right now. Daniel Naroditsky's twitch stream is amazing. Go watch 'em https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky
(If you're into chess, you almost certainly already know about him.)
He also gets into feuds with Hikaru and won't shut up about him for some reason nowadays, and is constantly on a soapbox, but whatever. The chess is fun to watch.
Now, if you saw a banner ad for that on lichess, would you really feel awful about it? I mean, that's a fine perspective, but I'm of the opinion of "just shovel all the content in front of me and let me pick out what I like." It works wonderfully on YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
But of course, your feelings are justified for modern ads as currently implemented. Mobile games are just a complete horror fest now. (It was delightful to discover Cardinal Quest 2, since every aspect of the game can be played without paying a cent or seeing an ad. It's more or less "chess, but with monsters.")
Frankly, yes. Lichess is such a relief because I know it's a place I can go without someone trying to sell me something.
I did, but if at some point they will have to add some ad, I won't consider that awful if done in the right way.
Why? Plenty of sites are able to survive solely on a donation model, even large ones. Look at Wikipedia.
Modest ads wouldn't be a problem if I hadn't seen so many major sites follow a slippery slope from that to obnoxious ads and heavy tracking.
After all, ad money $ will show up instantly and measurably in an A/B test or project outcome, while turned-off users, lost trust, garish design and poor performance have much subtler, harder to measure impacts.
And before you know it you're a newspaper website with 20 tracking scripts, or youtube with ads layered on ads layered on ads.
Naroditsky isn't paying you to promote his stream, so it doesn't qualify as an ad as ads are being referred to in lichess's post
On a normal day advertising is pretty useless. When the world is changing it is a very effective way to find that out. It is part of the system that drives rapid improvement.
The fact is that human biological impulse does not line up with rational objectives. People wouldn't need to be subjected to ads if it was desirable - they'd ask for them, much like those "shopping channels" you can choose to watch.
> People wouldn't need to be subjected to ads if it was desirable
Substantial value from ads is they communicate (1) what people didn't yet know existed and (2) what everyone else knows (because they saw the ad too).
Ads work by and large because people want the products that the ads are selling. A lot of ads are stupid and I'd personally rather not see them - but if I think that, they also probably aren't targeted at me.
evolutionary objectives are not rational. Nor are they particularly up-to-date, especially sugar cravings. Addictions, vices and impulses of many kinds are not at all rational, and it is a virtue to have the willpower to resist them.
> (1) what people didn't yet know existed
This is far from the only objective, and the substance of many ads demonstrates this: why do brands like coca-cola pay top-dollar for superbowl ad time? You would think they are well known enough..
> (2) what everyone else knows
Ads are not knowledge, it is common cultural reference for the purpose of advertisement. I don't see the value in this if you are not an advertiser.
> Ads work by and large because people want the products that the ads are selling
If we follow the same logic, no one would object to ad blockers, b/c the people who want to see ads wouldn't use them.
In a way, you are the one coming to PLATFORM (site, newspaper, TV program), so don't come back maybe, but don't tell PLATFORM whether they can out a distracting vase at the entrance, or ads on the sidebar, or a distracting ticker at the bottom of the screen.
For free to air TV I only watch, and it's very occasionally these days, shows that I have recorded to PVR where I skip all the adverts.
I avoid sites with pop-overs for newsletters or animated averts whenever possible.
They're not a "distracting vase at the entrance" they're a "crass man who steps into your path whilst screaming in your face".
I don't know what business models such sites should adopt but I do know that things that invasively take control from me or try to break my concentration, if only for a moment, are things I find deeply unpleasant.
That might say more about me than the advertising industry but there you go.
I'm grateful for sites like lichess and the stance they are taking. It's lovely and quite.
Just because it's not on screen the entire time doesn't mean it isn't a distraction. TV ad breaks are one of the best methods for producers - guaranteed impressions, broad audiences, official metrics, etc. - whilst also being the worst for consumers. An hour of my time set aside for watching something I enjoy now contains 20 minutes of content I don't care about at all, and cannot skip/bypass if not interested, and the 40 minutes of content is closer to 30 because of repeated content either side of ad breaks.
“We’ll be back in...<skip, skip, skip, skip>...and we’re back.”
I see this more as you technically having the ability to do this, but what makes it your “right”?
That doesn't mean I have the right to use a website that decides they aren't good with me doing so without the ads or other portions I may block.
I don't believe I have any moral obligation to make that choice myself. Simply put, I have the right to block ads, and the website has the right to block usage to me if I don't load said ads, trackers, etc.
Let’s assume I agree that you have been tricked into following a link that is infested with terrible ads and that I agree you have the right to block those ads.
Isn’t it then your obligation to never visit that site again?
You understand that ads are how the website has chosen to make money. You don’t like how they have chosen to make money so you simply never visit the website again, right?
It’s like if you found out a restaurant didn’t accept cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had a credit card, knowing in advance you can’t and won’t pay.
Not really. As long as your site is public, I can enter. If you don't want that, make it private, or subscription only.
> It’s like if you found out a restaurant didn’t accept cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had a credit card, knowing in advance you can’t and won’t pay.
It's more like going to a public museum that accepts donations and not making a donation. The place is public, and I decide if I pay or not.
As a publicly available resource, it is like browsing. I can browse many brick and mortar stores without exchanging anything of value. And like a store, if a website decided they did not want people browsing without a purchase, they could block access.
Even using your method, the website will transmit information about me to several ad networks without my consent about retargeting, about which sites I'm visiting, which sites I visited before (via referrer header) and will fingerprint me. Even with their (mostly non-compliant) GDPR cookie banners, information is still transmitted.
As far as I'm concerned, no website owner has ever given me a choice of "just using the back button".
Only ad-blocking is enough to stop this from happening.
This will become more funny with We assembly. There review isnahrder and even if it is free software it will be ages to verify the code the server delivers matches the source.
There is a fundamental control issue where a license debate is irrelevant detour. (For me this is the biggest flaw in the FSF - they haven't grasped that yet, while smart ideas would be needed)
The question is whether it is auditable and improvable. This is what free software is for.
That's why the FSF takes a stand against what it calls "software as a service substitute". Technically, they are correct, for the reason stated above. An Internet that is pure protocol, with clients for remote services being local apps, is not difficult to imagine; in fact, that's how it started and that's how it still works.
What's different is the friction of running an embedded blob from a webpage is negligible compared to installing a package on your OS, therefore the "distribution" phase of the software lifecycle is effectively factored out, making the opportunity for user choice minimal. (Unless you run NoScript or LibreJS by default, which I support.)
Economically, SaaS is the path of least resistance. You deliver your product through the same platform that people use to browse cat pics, and it works invisibly enough that users never question whether it's doing the right thing. This creates ample opportunity for externalities to be dumped onto the end user, as we observe with the nascent privacy crisis.
Perhaps such an externality is of a sufficiently complex or speculative nature that users may not be able to identify it, or willing to care. But that doesn't mean it's ruled out; at least in theory, integrating with the existing legal system by way of distributing your code under a Libre license seems like a good way to nip possible shenanigans in the bud. (As far as your code is concerned, of course - as opposed to everyone else's non-free code out there.)
Of course, everyone is free to do what they think best, but it's good to have the FSF's radical evangelism as a point of reference - it's quite possible to do meaningful computing in this way, although maybe not as part of an organization that ignores the ethical underpinnings of its methods! (And that's what computers do best nowadays: algowashing.)
Sadly, I find the FSF's approach to the Web somewhat misplaced - for software that is neither locally deployed, nor accessed as an opaque service, but remotely delivered on-demand, focus should be on the delivery chain being auditable, and source maps being available, in the case of WASM and minified JS.
Instead, we get LibreJS, which is, as far as I can see, a license-based whitelist - regardless of the fact that non-minified JS is open-source by definition and never compiled to a binary form. The GPL doesn't make a whole lot of sense for embedded scripts, powerful as they are. It would be more relevant for WebAssembly, that's for sure.
FSF could benefit from catchier nomenclature, even the "free as in blah blah" is too complex for the knee-jerk thinking cultivated in consumers; why couldn't they have called it "freedomware" or some such, I can't help but wonder; it was born in the same epoch as "shareware", "freeware", etc.
"Libre" is cute but causes associations with communism in the American public - same core userbase that is happy with shooting people in the name of "freedom", and would be proud to promote "freedomware", unlike today.
I take the complete opposite position: if I take the effort to make a website, I'll do what I want with it. Maybe I consider your visit an attack on my bandwidth, and I compensate with ads. If you don't like it, you're free to not visit it. Unless I told you in advance that you're not going to see ads, there's no basis for assuming that there won't be ads just like there's no basis for assuming you won't see NSFW content on a random website, religious content, political content, etc
Says who? Arguing against ads isn't arguing against compensation. You're assuming what is being assumed.
> When I go to a website, I decide to direct my attention to this website, because I believe it will offer something of interest to me.
You are specifically talking about compensation, which that quote does not.
That may well be true, but let me tell you a story.
I recently got into binge watching some old TV shows I enjoyed as a kid, like What's My Line and a few others. But most of the YouTube copies have the commercials stripped out!
The few videos that have the old commercials are a blast. The Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain. The Remington Rand Shaver! And as we all know, 9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camels.
Flintstones fan? How about Fred and Barney sneaking out back to smoke some Winstons while Wilma and Betty mow the lawn.
I wonder which of today's web ads will achieve the cultural significance of these old classics?
The fondness that I associate with those ads are because they are a window to a world that was simpler and in someways beautiful. Do I miss those times? Somewhat. Do I want those days back? Probably not, because for me (and my generation) the progress has been stupendous.
Our house was one of the first built in the neighborhood. The house being built next door after we moved in had one feature we didn't have: a bomb shelter!
So we made that our neighborhood clubhouse. It was a place where all the kids could hang out. We brought cookies and snacks and prepared for survival.
And when nothing bad ended up happening, and the new owners moved in and kicked us out, we were just happy that the world hadn't ended!
Thanks to HN for connecting people across time and space and enabling exchange of memorable experiences.
He discovered later he was only manipulated into that, but still classified this as good memories.
It's a little bit like those old adverts, it doesn't mean it is a good thing to perpetuate.
Some of the other ads were great. A live report from the computer room where the Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain was predicting the weather? Awesome! And a big step on the way to today where I can use Weather Underground forecasts and talk to you over radio and light waves on our personal supercomputers.
But you have to admit that the Remington Rand Univac Electronic Brain predicting the weather was pretty cool, yes?
This is very unlikely. Back in the day ads were a form of content in themselves. They had to be memorable to be effective, since your TV did not have a "click here" button. Web ads are more comparable to junk flyers, and I doubt you remember any of those.
Still doesn't mean I'm not installing and updating my adblocker!
He said after celebrating 10 years posting on a site that’s an ad for a VC fund...
I find it quiet strange, that we are living in a world where ads are so ubiquitous that a site is explaining why they don’t have ads, rather than webpages that use ads explain why they do.
Why more? If donations are enough why ads?
"Advertising is the way we grant power to the machine" - said Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872).
I'm thinking a lot about the nature of advertising. I guess, after all, it sells excess, stuff which shouldn't exist. It propels low quality, overproduction, unlimited and unnecessary growth. The pain-points of this current era.
Just take a look at our / tech / programming sector. We are well done without ads. I've never seen a Clojure or a CSS ad in my life, nor Atom, nor Linux. Nor Gmail, nor TakeShape, nor Vercel and the list is endless. Yet still using them and happy with them. And they are happy with me.
No ads work. In change, this market requires educated participants, not just blind consumers.
Advertising is not inherently evil.
When it becomes evil is when it intentionally tries to deceive us, capture and processe insane amounts of information about us, and influence the display of information for its own ends. If I did that to my wife, it wouldn't be OK.
Evil isn't an objective measure. However ads want to get some attention away from the content I care about to the ad.
One can argue that the "classic" Google ad, where I search for a pan and Google showing me ads for shops selling pans serves my request, at the same time I can argue that I was looking for a somewhat objective (while that's a lie - the algorithm showing search results has some biases) listing, while I get the one paying most.
In my judgment the ad is bad, but the attention it drags is my payment for the information.
If your single purpose in life was to play board games with your wife, you would probably also observe these tendencies in your questions.
The same can be said about any negotiation or even any interaction, can't it? Yet there are some people and some companies you like and some that you don't like.
I've been a customer liaison at a place where the customer actively went out of their way to see our sales guy; yes, it cost them money but he'd get them a better deal the they could on their own or with any other vendor they knew. He'd actively reduce his sale if possible without even mentioning but the customer had been with us for years and had noticed the pattern.
There's no reason why ads aren't a spectrum as well:
I see nothing wrong with a link to "this is the gear that I use" on a clearly marked page as long as they actually use it.
Or a couple of books. ("You must read these 30 books to be a successful <x>" is of course another thing entirely.)
No single snowflake is responsible for the avalanche. Even if a single ad is not inherently evil, in aggregate they have become a problem.
1. Not all snowflakes become avalanches.
2. If we didn't have snowflakes, we wouldn't have snow, and that would cause huge problems as well.
What resulted is that they turned off ads altogether[2]. I haven’t seen them post about a retrospective, but since they’ve never looked back. It seems like turning off ads was a good decision for both the users of OGS and the platform as a whole.
1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/speeding-up-ogs-around-the-wo...
> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users.
From your response:
> I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users.
The former puts users first; the latter puts them last. There’s a chasm between “what do they want” and “what will they bear”.
Maybe it's the Facebooks/Googles of the world who are responsible for creating a generation of developers that see ads as the only feasible business model?
If you have an ad-supported service, and you remove ads for a day, *100%* of your users will love you for it. That should tell you something!
However, I think advertising in itself isn't inherently evil. If a chess website served non-tracking, static (no-JS) banner ads about relevant products (maybe, specifically, chess products?) to offset costs, I don't see anything wrong with it. Of course the question is: "what is a relevant product to advertise next to chess?" Would... other board game advertisements be acceptable?
> to promote and encourage the teaching and practice of the game of chess and its variants".
So no, an advertorial for a book does not do anything for me.
Really? I'd love to hear more about this.
I'm writing in a paper notepad right now, found a web shop selling it by a normal Google result after describing what I was looking for, not an ad.
The pens I always buy I first bought in a stationary store, ended up liking them and now I always buy that brand.
Farmers sell their produce to supermarkets probably without having to advertize for them, and I go to the particularly supermarket I go to because it's closest to where I live.
Lots of things we use on a daily basis we never saw ads for, and yet they're sold to us by companies. Somehow.
hacker news is heavily affiliated with ycombinator - and I can almost guarantee that I've seen ads/puff pieces for ycombinator over the last decade.
> The pens I always buy I first bought in a stationary store, ended up liking them and now I always buy that brand.
Just because you purchased a product without seeing an ad for it doesn't mean that that company doesn't have an ad spend. How did they get to that stationery store in the first place?
> Farmers sell their produce to supermarkets probably without having to advertize for them
Farmers likely work with a coop style organisation (who _do_ advertise heavily), or maybe have some local link. That local link is generated by having a presence in local business forums, farmers markets, local stores. Back in the day, your local butcher or greengrocer would take out full page ad in your town's newspaper to show the special offers they have on this week, nowadays I get facebook ads for my butcher.
> Lots of things we use on a daily basis we never saw ads for, and yet they're sold to us by companies. Somehow.
That's a strawman; the original claim was that there are companies with no advertising, not that people buy products without seeing advertising for them.
> There are even some companies with no advertisement spending because their product is so essentially useful that people will seek it out themselves.
and that's in response to someone suggesting low profile/almost-no-ads. I completely agree about the low-profile/almost-no-ad approach (in the tech world having a community that evangalises for you is an advertisers wet dream, for example!), and I think that's what a lot of people in this thread are calling for. On a chess website, have ads for chess books/chess boards/novice-to-grandmaster streams, that sort of stuff, rather than shoving an ad for an Amazon mattress at the bottom of a blog post on Continuous Integration!
_That said_, their "Discover" range of videos on youtube sure look like ads (albeit not banner ads). I know that Tesla have had a presence at a bunch of EV events here in Scotland; they have a stall and cars there that you can test drive. It's definitely not banner-ad-on-google, (and the publicity from stating they don't do ads is likely an ad in itself), but it's definitely "paid marketing"
Super interesting though, thank you for giving me a rabbit hole to go down!
Literally the last thing I did before posting this comment was email a link to a Facebook in-app ad’s advertised product to myself because I wanted to look at it in more detail tomorrow.
I wasn’t looking for the product it was advertising, but I see how it could be extremely useful for me if it works.
Unless you do this with the majority of the ads you see, and you believe this is a common experience for most people?
Mozilla spends 10s of millions every year on “advertising and promotion” per their financial statements, though they have other things to advertise about than just Firefox.
It means a sign saying "no blue cars" is the exception proving the rule that non-blue cars are allowed.
It's good to know the rules, but you shouldn't live your life by them.
I wish more sites would do ads without using ad networks. Communities like the chess world are small enough that all the providers know each other and could probably work together in a way that benefits everyone, including users.
Want to put this to a test? Imagine if you were to create a competitor and you also wanted to run ads, now imagine you will be competing with an extremely successful project that people love that doesn’t run ads so you will never be able to offer a better experience to their users.
Lichess is unbeatable.
It's good that both exist. I spend 99% of my online chess playing time on Lichess but there are also lots of people for who it is the other way around.
The point is that creating a new chess site today would require to be better than lichess. If we look where Magnus Carlsen investment goes, they are all paid services (Play Magnus/chess24/chessable). He doesn't event try to compete with chess.com/lichess.
And the counterpoint that "but they might not have known about x product in the first place" is useless. Because if they wanted/needed something like x they would have just googled "something that can do x" and found x.com or whatever to discover it. To reiterate, the fact that they weren't looking for it in the first place means that they didn't want it.
See also this[0] guy that did extensive tests and found that "tasteful and responsible" banner ads pissed people off enough to negatively affect traffic to his website.
IF they need money they can open up a fundraiser or donation channel.
Also from a user's perspective, I would undoubtedly choose the one without ads of the two alternatives if they were competing.
Anything else means you're selling your reader's attention to the highest bidder. You're deliberately adding noise to your website and reducing its usability. Also it immediately introduces conflict of intetest: you're associated with the company you're advertising so any positive opinions you might have about their products ought to be taken with several grains of salt.
While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly. If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users.
If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly.