hcon · HackerTrans

Top quality cringe.

How can anyone watch this video and not see that it's a braggart looking for some fame?

Well, it's the model that works for almost everyone until some sort of shift happens.

For example, the ease of Adsense is the only reason why my forum is still alive. It's a medium-sized collaborative fiction writing forum with a userbase composed of mostly teens without money (I've tried scavenging for donations once).

Every year my banner ad makes me less and less money. And when it stops breaking even with its rent, I will close it down.

Now, some people in these threads, even perhaps yourself, would argue that my forum simply shouldn't exist since it's dependent on ads or because "I'm too lazy" to spend time trying to find a business model for a forum that already makes me almost no money, but it would be a loss for my users.

hcon

11년 전discuss

I mean "nobody" in the sense that it doesn't scale and people like you, god bless, do not replace ads for the vast majority of websites.

At least not until some sort of shift happens in how we pay for content which I think is imminent.

> Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product.

Perhaps rather: "Your product is not worth taking out a credit card and paying for" which applies to most websites. There are massive barriers to explicitly paying for things, even just psychological.

In an abstract sense, ads are like vignette windshield stickers that let you cruise past tollway checkpoints when the alternative is to have to stop at a tollboth even if it's just to pay 10 cents.

People have tried to create services that replace ads in that abstraction, but so far nothing has stuck. I think the post-ad solution needs to be just as mindless as ads if it's going to replace them.

hcon

11년 전discuss

Ever use Adwords or Adsense? People click on ads.

Fewer and fewer, but they still do and with enough volume to prop up entire businesses, small and multinational.

hcon

11년 전discuss

Obviously nobody does that.

My favorite example is when you see a popular github repository with a donate button (Flattr, Bitcoin address, etc) only to realize they've made a whole $14 in the past year. Wow, thanks world!

It turns out that ads worked because the user didn't actually have to do anything. They didn't have to get their credit card out of their wallet, something they rarely do on the internet.

And when they do, it's to give money to a large corporation like Netflix or because Jimmy Wales managed to beg for donations in a more invasive annoying way than a banner ad ever was. (You know, I never once had to see the face of the founder of AdultFriendFinder in one of their ads.)

I hope we find a next-coming middleground that changes the culture of what people are willing to pay for and how they do it. But the fact that giving your credit/debit card number to someone gives them (and anyone else) unlimited charge license on your account is not helping.

hcon

11년 전discuss

Yeah, I'm sure Adsense will let you proxy requests through my server soon or release some similar offering.

It would come at the massive expense of high-quality tracking and thus incur a massive reduction in ad revenue, but it's an imminent trade-off that beats unconditional adblocking.

I think everything is just waiting for the actual tipping point that forces everyone's hand like we always do. Adblockers are still the minority.

hcon

11년 전discuss

    > If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, 
    > then probably there is a problem with the stuff you 
    > offer not being valuable enough to people.

Not quite.

What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem.

The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among your competitors that's charging money. Maybe some HN nerds will care. Whoopdee doo. Nobody else does. The rest of the world isn't going to take their credit card out of their wallet when they can endure a banner ad instead.

Oh wait, they can just install an ad blocker the day they actually do care. Or maybe when their kid or significant other or buddy installs an adblocker on their browser like I did for my parents and they won't even realize the trouble it ever saved them.

See, I think that we will be soon on the cusp of a shift that needs to happen before we can replace ads at all, and it's more than just something a website can do by themselves by adding a paywall or whatever solution that doesn't work for most websites that people seem to conjure up in response to these issues.

hcon

11년 전discuss

    > Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads?

Google Adsense (for example) is a live auction clearing house where you paste a snippet of code into your site that resolves into the highest bidder for the keywords on each page. You're done.

Meanwhile, hosting your own ads entails finding advertisers, wooing them, developing a relationship with them, maintaining that relationship, negotiating a contract, settling that contract, building an ad-serving system somehow, automating it somehow, etc. And that's if you're even big enough to attract anyone or even warrant the work to begin with. And the second you try to generalize it (which is what ad networks do), then you're back on every adblocker's default blocklist.

hcon

11년 전discuss

This is my reaction whenever I hear someone suggest that "we should be rioting in the streets." I have daily personal struggles and work that I'm trying to pin down every day with all my energy. And my remaining time/energy go into finding a mate if I even have any at all.

hcon

11년 전discuss

Ending statements with question marks doesn't make them less committal, so just end them with periods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNIBV87wV4

hcon

11년 전discuss

Despite its name, the deepdream project seems more like an approximation of what happens in close-eyed mental visions you get from hallucinogens, especially the perspective flattening effect that you point out.

hcon

11년 전discuss

Sounds to me like your issue is with the author of Zombie.

hcon

11년 전discuss

Your comment has that weird Euro-omniscient voice I usually see on Reddit.

I'm Norwegian, have lived all over the world, and currently live in Prague. Produce has looked the exact same to me everywhere from Whole Foods to Walmart to Lidl to Tesco to the small corner market down the street.

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