The ads are a window into a blatantly illegal underground economy that Meta is not only failing to moderate, but is actively profiting from and injecting into users’ feeds.
At what point in internet history do you think website advertising was tolerable? Because in my eyes, it’s always been an aggressive obstacle to usability, since the dial-up era.
Movie piracy can be both, and it’s straight-up illegal. Hosting text is nothing in comparison. Images and video snippets are barely more than that. If all a website provides is bandwidth and storage, we all have that in spades, and if a website can’t let us share it, then a website is the wrong model.
Running a glorified chat server and image board in the year two thousand and fifty gigabits should not be remarkable. You are currently on a service patched together by randos hosting servers for fun. It replaces a website which, despite strenuous effort, made fuck-all revenue from a highly constructive and ordered community of millions.
I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every website needs to make money. Some worthwhile and widely-desired things simply lose money, and that’s fine. Expecting to monetize your family would be gross. Expecting to monetize community is not much better, and equally fruitless. Squeezing any blood from that stone requires some fundamental betrayals of what those relationships mean and why people seek them.
Social media sites only turned a profit when they undermined democracy. Advertising is propaganda for sale. If you think capitalism prevents us from even talking to one another without being gouged for the privilege or subjected to destabilizing abuse, then torches and pitchforks are on your left.
As opposed to when?
At what point in internet history do you think website advertising was tolerable? Because in my eyes, it’s always been an aggressive obstacle to usability, since the dial-up era.
I mean, you either pay the service so you don’t have to watch ads (like YouTube Premium) or you see ads that aren’t criminal behaviour or spam.
Either way, I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every service in the internet should be both free and ad free.
Movie piracy can be both, and it’s straight-up illegal. Hosting text is nothing in comparison. Images and video snippets are barely more than that. If all a website provides is bandwidth and storage, we all have that in spades, and if a website can’t let us share it, then a website is the wrong model.
Running a glorified chat server and image board in the year two thousand and fifty gigabits should not be remarkable. You are currently on a service patched together by randos hosting servers for fun. It replaces a website which, despite strenuous effort, made fuck-all revenue from a highly constructive and ordered community of millions.
I fail to understand how people got into the mindset that every website needs to make money. Some worthwhile and widely-desired things simply lose money, and that’s fine. Expecting to monetize your family would be gross. Expecting to monetize community is not much better, and equally fruitless. Squeezing any blood from that stone requires some fundamental betrayals of what those relationships mean and why people seek them.
Social media sites only turned a profit when they undermined democracy. Advertising is propaganda for sale. If you think capitalism prevents us from even talking to one another without being gouged for the privilege or subjected to destabilizing abuse, then torches and pitchforks are on your left.