Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June
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I wonder how much collective energy use could be attributed to showing ads to everyone all the time? I have to believe it's non-negligible.
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Oh no, just that free users generally aren't worth as much to advertisers, so they won't pay as much to target them. The people who actually pay are worth a lot more because they'll tend to have money, and so they're willing to pay more.
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Disclaimer: in-comment-thread ads by Aurich are exempted from the 'ad-free' experience.If you're in the "wow I'd pay to escape ads" camp then I should note that a subscription to ars technica dot com is completely ad free!
I kid I kid.
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If you're in the "wow I'd pay to escape ads" camp then I should note that a subscription to ars technica dot com is completely ad free!
Sheeeeeit, even I, recipient of so many temporary bans, will keep paying that fee.
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this is no surprise to those of us who still remember the promises that it wasn't and then subsequent revelation of all user data being harvested and sold in the last Citron project OpenFeint.
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Can't wait for the next gamer chat app to come around, start out awesome as hell, then slowly turn to shit, whos with me?
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I realised a while ago that there are services we would do well to pay for so that the user is the customer and not the product, but then I realised that no one will take a chance on a new pay service and almost no one will pay to keep adds off an existing service, so we've pretty stuck with what we have.
My hope is that open federated tools with paid hosting and moderation will gain scale in a few niche areas and slowly grow to mass acceptance. It's the only way I can see things changing.
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it's probably at LEAST a double-digit percentage of all human energy use, time, and endeavor
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Disclaimer: in-comment-thread ads by Aurich are exempted from the 'ad-free' experience.
I kid I kid.
UPGRADE TO AD FREE ARS PRO TODAY
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I mean at this point this is the lifecycle of any consumer software/web project out there (and no small number of commercial/business software/web projects).
Maybe we have this whole internet economics thing completely structured wrong?
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I hope Bluesky manages to navigate that. They got critical mass without ads, that's the hard part. They just need to not blow the next step.
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By the way, the mobile screenshots scaling to article width are a menace in wide mode. Is it possible to set a reasonable maximum size for them?If you're in the "wow I'd pay to escape ads" camp then I should note that a subscription to ars technica dot com is completely ad free!
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Ran my own Teamspeak server for times when several of us wanted to play Diablo 2 or Neverwinter nights. Didn't need much of a server. Had an old P3 with some variant of Linux on it. Didn't use much bandwidth or machine power to run. Bonus was using the same machine as the game server. Used a commercial TS service later when World of Tanks was a big thing and several buddies and I were in the same clan. Big advantage of TS was it only used one IP port for the basic chat and 1 or 2 more for optional file and icon sharing. Fairly easy to setup a firewall rule to accommodate. Plus you knew the IP address or simple URL.
Early versions of Discord were always a mess firewall wise. It wanted the top 25% of all outbound ports open to the entire Internet. Not exactly security friendly. Resisted using it for that reason. Don't know if that is still the case. Discord isn't giving me much reason to find out now.
May have to revisit Teamspeak. Seems the free version still allows for 32 online users. Plenty large enough for any VTT games I would be part of.
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I would think so too... I use an ad blocker and pay for things like Ars where I can... but those times that I need to disable the blocker because something isn't working properly on the page make my eyeballs feel assaulted like I'm a Neanderthal stumbling into Times Square.
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I value my ad-free (or as close as I can get) life more than I value ANY internet content provider. I'll stop watching youtube forever with no qualms at all if they try any dumb shit and don't back down.
Also tell your friends at Facebook I said that they're making the world a worse place and I hope their company fails, but it's not too late for them to do something good with their skills.
xoxo!
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I don't pay for Discord and I have yet to see any ads on either my desktop or mobile. Maybe its just unobtrusive?
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I know, but let me have this dream, please!
I'm very much in agreement with you. What a sad timeline we live in.
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I guess all the VC money has dried up and we are going to have to go back to managing our own servers again.
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Hrm, maybe it will be like Spotify. Using it in-browser instead of the app lets uBlock stop 100% of ads.
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This'll just push me to give up Discord. At first on mobile, and then when the enshittification progresses like the Sahara moves south, slowly, inexorably, I'll just give it up completely.
Of course, I'm also not in the target user group for Discord - I use it to keep in touch with three specific people. That's it. They can have my phone number when the time comes.
Of course, I'm also not in the target user group for Discord - I use it to keep in touch with three specific people. That's it. They can have my phone number when the time comes.
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How is that advertisers seemingly have an infinite budget to sell their products everywhere, and more and more and more often everywhere?
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I mean, it isn't unreasonable that they want to make money at some point. They've basically just been providing a free service for a decade while burning venture capital cash.
This is the problem with the model where everything must be free on the internet to succeed.
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Well, crap. I had no idea that they were planning an IPO. That's the beginning of the end for their quality.
Oh hell no. Discord is a communication platform, not an ad platform. If they want to make it an ad platform, then it will die and I will happily wave goodbye to it.
Oh hell no. Discord is a communication platform, not an ad platform. If they want to make it an ad platform, then it will die and I will happily wave goodbye to it.
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Keep in mind that's driven by VC's themselves though... because they have spent 20 years paying for growth not profitability... so the formula was 'free shit to build an audience', and then add ads later to find some profitability.
VC's built this damned thing.
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The problem for them is thinking ads and public offerings are the solution for profitability, when instead it is "charge money for the product" and add features people actually want, in part or in whole behind the subscription tier.
If they still aren't making enough money to pay the bills, then downsize the company so the overhead is lower. It's not sexy, nor will it make you rich, but it's a proven business model.
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Signal is also a generally good chat/voice/video client as well these days, and doesn’t require setting up your own servers.
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According to Ibis, they estimate the total advertising expenditure in the US to be $354 billion. While there isn't really a way to translate to energy expenditure, it's an accurate measure of the total value of resources thrown into advertising.
The relationship between advertising and net societal utility is complicated to say the least; as advertisements themselves can be either beneficial (exceptionally rare in the modern landscape, i.e. seeing an advertisement for a good product you didn't know about) but are very often direct attempts to sabotage people's decision making abilities (literally everything else). And advertisements both sponsor good entertainment and create atrocious perverse incentives. Old school socialist and communist literature saw the advertising industry as damn-near pure waste in capitalist economies; modern advertisement techniques indicate they were too kind on advertisements.
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What the fuck is the point of discord, reddit, any big de-facto social media company going public? They don't need more money, they don't need more capital, the only reason I can see for it is because the founder(s) aren't happy with being reasonably set for life, but want to join the goddamn billionaires who treat the global economy like a fucking board-game to be won and lost.
Discord got its meteoric growth because you didn't need everyone in the goddamn world to be on it for it to be the best social media platform in its niche, you just needed the handful of friends you played with to join it for the platform to be worth engaging with.
If some dipshit MBA brain comes up and thinks they can treat that platform like Reddit, they're going to learn just how easy it is to replace.
Discord got its meteoric growth because you didn't need everyone in the goddamn world to be on it for it to be the best social media platform in its niche, you just needed the handful of friends you played with to join it for the platform to be worth engaging with.
If some dipshit MBA brain comes up and thinks they can treat that platform like Reddit, they're going to learn just how easy it is to replace.
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So ... another tool that I love using will soon be destroyed by Wall Street. Great.
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They don't. The cost of the ads is passed on in the form of increased prices for the customer and decreased profits for the manufacturer. Facebook will openly say that you should tell them what your margins are so that they can
There are plenty of execs frustrated that advertising is a zero-sum game and an unsustainable bubble, but the problem with an arms race is that no one feels safe to deescalate the situation. After all, what are you supposed to do when your competitors can buy up all the Google ads related to your company's name?
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