Thoughts on ads for kbin?

Avarice, 11 months ago

Ads only put pressure on sites to conform to their standards and wants. Even Google has felt the impact of coordinated advertising backlash, like with YouTube's Adpocalypse.

That said I absolutely agree we should support the site in any way we can, which is also why I'll put the link here so you can donate to @ernest for maintaining the site. Servers aren't cheap!

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

rosatherad, 11 months ago

Rookie mistake for people breaking away from the corporate hellscape governed by capitol: Wanting the familiar environment back and thinking they can compromise and play fair with capitalists. There's no such thing as fairness when you're a consumer negotiating with a company. Give them an inch, they'll take a mile!

pasci_lei, 11 months ago

@Technological_Elite I would rather make a 1 - 2 € donation per month than having ads all over the place.

IBNobody, 11 months ago

I am a noob to the fediverse, so take that with a grain of salt.

From what I understand (from reading why the Mastodon migration failed), if a site encourages ads/subscriptions, there is an incentive from other fediverse sites to defederate that site. (We wouldn't be able to interact with other sites.) We're pseudo-defederated right now due to Cloudflare, but that is temporary.

tal, 11 months ago

Why would any other instances care if an instance shows ads? I mean, it's not hurting them, and if a site doesn't show ads and can provide the same content, presumably it will wind up with the users, as they won't want ads, all else held equal.

If one instance can show ads and it is significantly more-responsive or something (i.e. can reduce the load on the hardware with ad money), then that might be a worthwhile tradeoff for some users.

IBNobody, 11 months ago

The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining, and been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.

https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/

So, in summary, while you may have a logical argument for ads and subs, there are enough fringe people out there with power over servers in the fediverse that disagree.

tal, 11 months ago

I agree with the author to the extent that scaling issues matter a lot, and I strongly suspect that a whole lot of people enthusiastic about fediverse systems are wildly underestimating the amount of work that is involved in building something that does scale, not to mention that there are hardware and network costs involved, and that this is not free.

There are lots of software packages that can be had at no cost -- the cost of providing a software package is low. But there are far fewer truly free software services.

I can imagine all sorts of ways that might be handled. It might be possible to engineer a system that is very resource-light. It might be possible to have a network that self-organizes users to more-efficiently-usable-for-them nodes, though this would involve working differently than I understand the present systems to function. It might be possible to have some mechanism where end users to the system contribute computational, storage, or network resources linked to their usage of the system -- think of BitTorrent, say.

I can believe that if the platform's authors have particular ideological views -- I am a little concerned about some comment I saw linked to where a lemmy dev apparently said something like "we want to make it hard for right-wingers to use our platform" -- that is problematic.

I am not as convinced that a number of instances taking that position will kill things for the platform. If a view is fringe, then you wind up with restrictions only affecting the fringe. Usenet had (no doubt still has) servers that had various restrictions on what content they will accept and pass on, but that didn't make Usenet unusable, because the systems that became the core of the network did not. If there is enough interest in a network that doesn't have ideological restrictions, then I would think that users will wind up on instances that don't impose those restrictions. If a purist set of instances want to cut themselves off from it, well, fine, but that doesn't prevent the other set from operating. Think of, say, the IRC network splits. Yes, there were IRC networks that had restrictive terms of use, but there were also other IRC networks that did not.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

It's probably a bit early for this sort of thing, but I don't have a fundamental objection to it. One nice thing about the fediverse is that the different instances can compete with each other, if one is able to provide the same service as another with no need for ads then users will flock to that one instead of the ad-riddled one.

I actually wouldn't mind using an instance that had simple banner ads or sidebar ads, as long as they didn't try to insert themselves into the content. I've trained myself to ignore such things quite effectively.

jeebus, 11 months ago

Ads are the worst thing to ever happen to the internet. If they're added to kbin, I would like the option to pay for my usage and get ad-free, just like Reddit does now. But there also must be some sort of guarantee that advertisers will never be allowed to dictate the direction of the site.

pope1701, 11 months ago

No, I don't want to be the product again. Look where that brought us in all the other social networks. If you don't pay for it, you're not the customer.

I'd rather pay for another subscription, if in turn the were guaranteed services.

Technological_Elite, 11 months ago

I can see your point of view, but this is why I said optionally, for those who want to support kbin via ads. A subscription or donation should also be great options. Nothing should be forced like r*ddit.

mrKreme, 11 months ago

My idea instead of ads would be to do what Wikipedia does, which is run a donation fund every year that collects money to run the operation or monthly

Magess, 11 months ago

The problem is the incentives it creates. If [some portion] of revenue comes from ads, then you have to abide by what advertisers want. Or more precisely don't want, or else you lose that money. Is that NSFW content? Queer content? You've introduced a party into the ecosystem that gets to set their own rules, which may be at odds with the interests of the admin and the users.

Also, ads are only worth something if they're targeted. That means data mining and capturing as much information about you as possible, and kbin would be the ones having to do that mining.

Ads are how we got here. Paying for services we use is the only real alternative.

Starshine, 11 months ago

Yeah ads never bothered me on reddit. They were sometimes kind of funny too. And also i support everything that support Kbin in any way. So Kbin should use ads to get money!