Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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Erm, but, uh... There's nothing about decentralization that makes it inherently ad free. We currently have an ad-free network of sites, but we also used to have an ad-free web.
Decentralization does not solve this. The only reason there's no ads here is that they haven't arrived yet.
Not really. It's mainly because the site belong to idealists and hosting is cheap because it's text.
Not sure if this is what the previous user was getting at, but I think we should put it a different way: it's not about whether or not the admins of a given site/instance refuse to host ads, but if they can meaningfully prevent ads from manifesting on their platform.
If there is money to extract from people, the advertisers will eventually arrive, invited or not.
On Reddit, for instance, I'd be willing to guess that the majority of ads were not formal ads, but rather astroturfed content from informal advertisers.
The only reason Lemmy is not seeing that (at least not so overtly) is because it's still small and obscure. But security through obscurity is not really a winning strategy in the long run.
That's fair but I think you're both worrying a bit too much. Astroturfing is a problem, sure, but it's a first-world problem compared to spyware-driven engagement-maximization algorithms.
Websites on webrings used to have ads too.
And there is some classism in enforcing the idea that these kinds is websites have to be self hosted with the cost borne by the admin only. Not everyone around the world has the combination of money, time, and computer access to self host.
I'll spin up my own instance if necessary. Problem solved.