Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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I've been using Firefox since the beginning, before that Mozilla, and before that Netscape Navigator.
But I think it's finally time to switch to Librewolf.
I don't want digital advertising of any kind, even if my privacy is "preserved" through fancy data-laundering.
They could just use non-personalized ads instead tbh. They do need to earn some money after all
If every ad-supported website went dark today, nothing of value would be lost.
I don't agree. As a single counter example of many YouTube has a huge wealth of information and content.
Maybe that value isn't worth the ads, that is much harder to say for certain. But it is clear that there is some valuable information on some sites that are supported by ads.
Duckduckgo manages to have privacy respecting ads. I really value that. If you're searching cars, cars pop up, they don't look at your history or anything else. Unobtrusive and you can look away
And you can just… Turn them off. No questions asked. DuckDuckGo is a great example of how an advertising company can be both financially viable and respecting of user-choice.
Google could let users choose to opt out of seeing any ads across their network for free today and still be one of the most profitable companies in existence. A huge percentage of users wouldn’t know or care to turn ads off, another percentage actually wants them, and for advanced users they could offer more advanced, useful features for money.
But try pitching that to stakeholders and upper-management lol
Wikipedia’s source links? Lemmy’s news links? KnowYourMeme, GIF websites?
That's a nice thought.
Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.
Then suddenly you realize you haven't heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It's November 28th and you heard someone mention a 'new president' but you didn't even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn't have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that's what all those "Vote Now!!!" yard signs were about, fuck....
It's a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It'd be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90's. Maybe we'd do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.
This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet -- or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter -- would write.
LOL, nope. Try getting your apps from F-Droid instead of the Google Play Store.
Genuine questions: If we get rid of all the ads, how do news companies get funded? Information can be freely copied and redistributed online -- including all news articles. How would our favorite tech sites be funded?
I'll be honest, I donate every chance I get to support devs for the awesome free software and services they provide, but news is different. I don't actually pay for any news. It comes from so many sources. What's the best financial model for news companies in a capitalist society? As a consumer, what's the ethical model for paying for or consuming news?
@[email protected] has whored his karma already, he isn't answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.
To clear that up, I'm coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I'm not saying ads are a good thing, I'm telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.
Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it's online, but most people still don't... The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don't pay for a subscription at all, and that's where the ads come in.
However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don't even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.
P.S. I'm Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What's a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn't show ads that I can get with F-Droid?
Voyager
I use Eternity, which is based on the old Infinity app for that other platform
I'm really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.
No problem! Happy to help!
Sent from Eternity