this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It started out great at the times of Aaron Swartz, but just as with people, cancer sometimes hits. Anyway, it influenced projects like lemmy for which I'm thankful.
Yes I'm aware of the history. The only way to kill cancer is excise it. Lemmy realistically can't take a full migration from Reddit but that needs to change. I too am super grateful. Part of me wonders if this platform could end the same way but given it's decentralised nature, I highly doubt it. Reddit was open source once. I really want this to succeed. Seize the means of communication.
Open source and decentralized are two different things, as long as it's just a bunch of independent server instances which are small enough each to handle the traffic load you can't really buy that out.
The question is if it'll take off, more or less.
It already has.
we're here aren't we (grin). Looking forward to seeing how this plays out for sure.
One thing that worries me is Lemmy's dedication to non-advertisement funding. Lemmy will never be able to handle a ton of people without money for server space and bandwidth. I hate ads as much as anyone, but there are ways to do it that aren't intrusive or toxic or damage your integrity.
The privacy movement can't sell out to private entities or all bets are off again, I think no advertisements is wholly nessasary. I think taking out Reddit is much more achievable than many people think. Yes it will take some money and resources.
Yes, but where is that money going to come from?
The money is coming from the community, which is why progress is slow. People don't have much money. It doesn't mean we should sell the soul of the project for a quick buck. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Rome wasn't built for free either, we need some sort of financial backup. Even if it isn't advertising something needs to be in place.
Yes, but this place is electronic and exists in an aether. It's possible to do at minimal costs.
There's no such thing as the aether. It exists on other people's computers, which they want to be paid to use.
As more and more people host their own federated instances it won't be as big of a problem as it was for web 2.0 legacy sites like reddit. The Fediverse really is the future.
There are ways to do advertising that works and is not annoying (or at least less annoying). Context advertising are ads that are directly related to the subject matter of interest. For example, ads from companies that are in the business of meeting the needs of the boatbuilding community would be welcome or at least tolerated in a boatbuilding community. Those same ads shown to a programming community would be less welcome, even if there happens to be significant shared membership.
For example, the paper magazine "Small Craft Advisor" recently transitioned to online only via Substack. It didn't take long for subscribers to actually complain about the loss of advertising and SCA had to respond with self-promotion articles from former advertisers.
Context advertising requires no user profiling, no user tracking, and no data collection. "Oh, you sell epoxy (or sails or plans)? Well here is a community (as distinct from a user profile) that is likely looking for what you sell and probably already discussing products in your line of business."
There is a site I am familiar with that was determined to not have intrusive ads and actually created a side business of creating ads for its advertisers that it would find acceptable on the site, which consisted of a still image of given dimensions, and a link.
When you say no data collection, you mean no personalized data collection, right? Obviously they would want to know how many times the ad was clicked.
That sounds like the kind of thing I envision.
Yes, no personalized data collection. Both sides of the ad transaction would need to track something if the placement had some kind of impressions or click-through payment system. It's been a while since I've managed a website, but I think most of that can be handled with pretty basic logging that has existed since before micro-targeted advertising was even conceived.
For a simple placement contract like we have with what few newspapers remain, the ad supplier could assess the value of the placement for themselves using standard referrer logs. Not paying its way? Don't renew the placement.
yes, its origins were great, it's finale is not so great. I suspect if Aaron were alive he'd be livid. I also think reddit's demise might be the intended outcome, like BCG is at the helm or somesuch.