That’s the nicest thing I’ve had said to me in owl’s years!
Its becoming harder to do that due mostly to the way javascript applications are developed. These apps use huge libraries of tools which could be referenced at browser level and loaded as packages. Instead they are deployed in the source trees of the application itself. So an application may use grunt version N, but because of the way it is deployed, it is impossible to validate as such.
If JS had an API where it could tell the browser "I need grunt between versions N and P, then the browser could load those versions if it was happy to do so. The mass quantities of JS code which actually get loaded are very hard to check at run time.
This situation sucks for everyone. The direct ad business is gone unless you’re massive. You don’t get pre-approval of ads anymore. CTR (Clickthrough ratios) are a curiosity, but all anyone sells now is inventory - eyeballs. And there are levels upon levels upon levels of everything from direct-buy ads to real-time-bidding and tradedesk sales for your eyeballs. I know. Since 2006, with the exception of my stint at Wikimedia, my day job has been supporting the infrastructure for online advertising.
Places like BB are disproportionately affected because 1) we have a tech-savvy group of viewers blocking ads (and the trackers that count them) leading to us looking like we have way less “inventory” than we really have, and 2) because we’re too tiny to demand change, and 3) we could never make up our operating costs on subscriptions. If a place like ArsTechical can’t do it, we sure can’t.
The exact same issue is holding back HTTPS-by-default implementation, so it doubly grinds my gears.
the worst part is, adblockers are going to make this entire mess even worse as the networks try to figure out how to get around them. Ugh.
Adblockers will win because ads will become a menace just to be seen. Before that there will be a lot of bloodied noses and the like, especially from giants like Google who will have to make up that revenue through, I predict, more invasive android bits or through sponsored searches or something.
I only hope before all that gets resolved and a new revenue model found, that the smaller independent sites don’t all disapper, swallowed into larger media companies who, themselves, are trying to deal with the decline of broadcast advertising (and eyeballs).
Yes, I think I yet miss the particular tracing tutorials that demonstrate running 128 cores on a Power8 or something and finding out (for renicing and sleep) which ones are subsumed by ad scripts, cursor tracking, etc.
But the art school ad insert of an engaging claque of scripts each of which is emotionally concerned one way or another with the other’s free rein hasn’t happened but five times or so. Oh wait, actual malware, which like?
Knoxblox > Android pop-ups…
No need to use up a bag. Just order them the Lyft full of larvae that’s designated for almond grove mulch instead of animal feed or foodstuff. So…the ads are a Nougat mix-in?
How is it harder? You don’t want script? Turn off the script preferences in your browser. Done.
The thing is, the people who object to script running are easily less than 0.001% of the browsing population. Compare that to the number of Facebook users (Facebook can’t be used without JS) and you’ll know which audience developers are catering to.
I am okay with javascript running but I would prefer to be running less code, so that source code analysis has a chance of telling me what it is doing. But if heavy libraries are distributed with the application, there is little chance of this.
I would prefer the libraries to be provided by the browser, loaded once and validated once.
edit: At the moment its like the bad old days of native apps on windows where an application would replace a standard DLL for no apparent reason and impact other apps. At least in the sense that you now have multiple copies of stuff which you should have one copy of.
Why is it not even an option? I’m not saying “an option to make up that money entirely” but “why don’t you bother to offer it?” Money is money. If you offer it, some percentage of users here will pay. If you don’t offer it, we can’t.
That’s doomed to fail. Browser makers and extension/plugin authors want to do what their users actually want and a lot (most?) of them think that ads are out of control and actively destructive to people. The fact that people got malware from the New York Times’ ads within recent memory (among others) only strengthens that case.
“Will become”? That ship has already sailed. “Are.”
That’s not going to happen.
Buy a t-shirt, my friend.
You and I have had this exchange before and, if you ponder the halls of memory, I’ve bought stuff from the site.
This isn’t about me. This is about everyone here. If you offer subscriptions, many users will buy them. If you refuse to do so but rely on ads, then you can’t be surprised when revenue trends only downwards. Is the infrastructure to offer subscriptions so expensive that it isn’t worth the effort for you to put the work in to offer it?
Hell, I still pay $40 a month to the hackerspace I co-founded and was an officer of even though I’ve been there three times in the last year.
I don’t see why it shouldn’t. Package management is a solved problem. If we don’t work that way, we have no hope of controlling the software which runs on our computers.
I’m saying that the browser makers are not going to personally offer this. I was responding to your specific statement that I quoted. It isn’t even in the tertiary list of “things to do” for Firefox or Chrome, for example. Solving basic and then complicated security issues are much more pressing, as are performance and generally pushing the state of the art and standards.
You’re preaching to the choir. I spend several hundred dollars a month on Patreon supporting creators. I know this has been investigated and dismissed, and I’m exactly the wrong person to speak as to why (but I trust that the research and reasoning is sound, given the effort put into this whole process).
So, it doesn’t work for BB currently. Maybe it will someday. The one thing I can assure you, as someone who remembers running BB pre-ads, is that the Authors would remove them tomorrow if they could sustain the business that way. But right now they are critical partners for us.
I didn’t even think of the patrons that I support, which are mostly writers and artists.
No I’m under the impression that google distributes slightly more of it to content providers than most competing ad networks. None the less the vast majority of that money goes to google.
Other countries are typically much better at public subsidies for media and the arts. And have stricter regulation than the US does on what can be advertised where and how. But advertising still exists, and largely functions the same. Many of the worlds largest advertising firms are based in London. And plenty have offices in Japan.
But that situation is generally good, And often better. An acknowledgement that ads as part of funding not the whole thing works better. The additional funding tends to create a lot more varied media overall. Keeps more people employed. And honestly look at the BBC. One of the most profitable and influential media operations in the world. All fostered by the back stop of a public tax specifically to fund it.
Even stuff from the boingboing store turned out to be trash. Fool me once, etc.
But for sites like Wired … I just turn Javascript off. The eventually answer is who has more control of my computer - me, or the advertisers.
Seems to me the entire thing is a shining example of ‘the tragedy of the commons’
The current advertising model might work if the worst of the advertising had been restrained about it.
Instead we got the most greedy advertisers poisoning the web, which lead to hard ad-blocking going mainstream, which lead to extra-intrusive ads in retaliation, which lead to extreme ad-blocking, which gives the current situation.
At any stage, advertising would have been blocked by the techy-audience anyway, but the mainstream wouldn’t likely bother. By going for it hard, they forced adblocking into the mainstream and so created their own nemesis.
For my current view, i no longer whitelist any site.
I’m happy to buy subscriptions/patreon/donations and so on for extras, but adverts get blocked online, no exceptions.
The ground has been salted, anyway i’m someone who’ll frequently go out of their way to avoid a product if the advertising annoys me (which is nearly always), so me not seeing their advert actually increases my purchasing chance.
May I ask who writes the “Boing Boing Store” posts? I assume that if the regular writers did them, they would use their own bylines. The text very much reads like ad copy rather than review, and the products seem rather dodgy.
The copy is from the store not the BB staff… That said the BB staff has been known to make the titles more amusing.