I'm in a situation right now where I read and enjoy content made by professional publishers, and I also generally hate the direction Internet Advertising has gone. I'm a fan of the book Extreme Ownership, and reading your question got me thinking (a bit laterally, admittedly) about the book. I'll start with the premise that underlies my thoughts here: I like content that some publishers put out, and I accept that it costs money to produce. Everyone else, to quote the famous nihilistic philosopher B. Publishers who put out quality content and whose ads don't try to serve me malware (eh, Forbes?) get whitelisted. I use an ad blocker, but I whitelist the pages where I think it's worthwile. Catchy is good enough to make people waste time, but not money.Įdit: oh - it's not all black and white, either. Many publishers make money through ads because most people wouldn't pay a dime for that stuff. If I ever ended up on websites like Wired or The Verge in the last five years or so, it was definitely by mistake. These days, I can't remember the last time I've read a good article on technology someplace other than on a blog, a website of a group of enthusiasts. For a long time, I subscribed to computer magazines like Byte, even when I had Internet access and supposedly had all the information at my fingertips. I am happy to pay directly for content that is interesting and useful to me. Today, this extension is merely still going to the store, but ignoring what we dislike. We use to speak with our attention, we didn’t like this store, so we never went there. The issue is, we want all this but want to provide them with little or not compensation for their value. Unwilling to pay, the product is you.Įither pay with your money or lack of attention and this seems like it’s no longer a problem. Through out this thread I’ve seen people say they have no respect for Facebook or google and their ads, yet services they use daily. However, the value walks with out attention And not our moral desires. I think we can all agree, some porn and content is not good. You’re actions speak in the camp of them being good.
That value comes at a price, rather you think they are good or not good for the ego system. However, you still do, so they have value. Then I guess ads on these sites don’t matter, as they are so pointless, you’re not Visiting these sites. Thanks for getting to the point I wanted. So thanks for speaking up and asking blunt questions like this despite the flack I'm sure you get. Unfortunately, the Church of Bitcoin attendees welcome questions like your about as much as parents welcome people saying that Santa doesn't exist. You can tell them because they will distinguish between present and (imagined) future.) (There's another, much smaller segment for whom the idea is something they are working toward. As the idea and the real thing diverge, it becomes more obvious that a large number of Bitcoin-the-idea adherents are essentially religious in their behaviors. Even though Bitcoin-the-reality is in fact not helpful for this. So Bitcoin-the-idea has everything to do with any money-related problem. You can see the start of it in the initial paper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." This is the techno-libertarian ideal of a perfect, stateless financial system that magically solves all financial problems Approximately nobody uses it for actual commerce. That's the thing that (slowly) does 2-4 transactions per second, and is mostly driven by speculation and some light crime. One is the actual technical system that exists. I've come to realize that there are two things called "Bitcoin". The information ecology and economy have changed. The number of people who find the BBC or any other establishment organ both ideologically congenial and politically relevant has undergone a decline that’s irreversible. The Overton window for polite opinion hasn’t shifted much but people are a great deal more aware of the alternate viewpoints and possibilities.
The explosion in television channels and more importantly, the internet led to an information free for all. People outside the Overton window hated the established media, whether the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph or the ostensibly non-partisan BBC. Whether that was 30-70 or 40-60 on some hypothetical left-right scale the effect is the same. The BBC and all the similar organisations in different countries helped define the bounds of polite opinion. More importantly, being a bureaucracy that still exists we know that it’s continued existence is its primary aim. By virtue of the people in the industry it must have a left wing bias.