[Blackthorn]

I posted this deep in a thread but feel like it should be a higher level comment so here we go.

Websites can be so ridiculously short sighted and just want to squeeze out every penny they can not thinking of the users they end up losing in the process. And they do lose users And fast. Personal experience time!

I ran a pretty popular wiki for Dungeons and Dragons homebrew on what used to be called Wikia. At some point they decided they available needed to have some terrible new skin that was stuffed with ads and unbelievable ugly. We pushed back but they were adamant about forcing it, so I took all the content and all the users and self hosted it for almost a decade afterward. The Wikia site was completely dead. Sucks for them but their choice.

I paid $10/mo or $20/mo for the site depending on the year, and never ran ads. At one point I got an offer from a company in the same hobbyist space to buy it from me. At that point I was extremely sick of being my own sysadmin and worrying about security vulns so I accepted it. Now some time later they're trying to pull the "stuff it full of ads in the worst places!" routine. Users are getting pissed and starting to ask me about taking all the content...and users...and going off to a server adminned by me again.

If I do this, it will be completely devastating for the site and tank their traffic. Do they care or realize? Guess we'll see.

All of this could be avoided if they just made the ads less shitty. Not showing up in the middle of navigation bars. Not being bigger than the surrounding content, so it completely stretches it and ruin's the site layout. Not having a completely clashing background color to the site. All extremely simple stuff.

[rstuart4133]

I occasionally go The Guardian's web site, and they displayed a nag say I should not be blocking their way of making money out of a non-subscriber. I thought "fair enough" and disabled my ad blocker. About 2 minutes later, which is what it took for their web site to load with the ad blocker off, I turned it back on again.

In the end solved my attack of the guilts by becoming a subscriber. However, I had no sympathy for them no getting money form ads. That was totally self inflicted. The ad blocker, the thing they were blaming, wasn't the problem. Without the ad blocker I would not be visiting their site at all.

[Nextgrid]

When I see a site that attempts to stalk me (even if my countermeasures manage to block it) the last thing I would do is to hand them my personal and billing details on a platter, give them money, and act as a "manual" tracking cookie by logging into my account every time I visit the website (to bypass the paywall).

At least beforehand the best they could do is to get pseudonymous network & browser data (if they managed to get past my countermeasures like uBlock and nasty IP ranges blocked at the network level), where as once I pay they now have confirmed billing details they can do whatever they want with. If they don't respect my privacy before I pay then I have no reason to trust they'll suddenly respect it after I pay. Most likely they'll just attempt to have their cake and eat it, aka take my money and still stalk me.

[johnisgood]

Yeah, the load times without uMatrix and uBlock Origin are abysmal for A LOT of sites.

[birdyrooster]

This reminds me of A/B testing that likely was the method Google unwittingly used to obfuscate sponsored results in Search. The A/B test KPI they were measuring clearly was creating more click through to sponsored properties and it eroded trust and utility in exchange. I am sure they increased their short term Ad Words profits.

[TeMPOraL]

I keep saying: A/B testing is how Satan influences this world. They make it all too easy to turn your product development into optimizing bad metrics, and they give ammunition for justifying self-destructive decisions (it must be good, the data says so).

[umvi]

> it must be good, the data says so

Slightly unrelated, but I heard a good quote the other day: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

[mumblemumble]

With the advent of AutoML tools, it doesn't even take that long anymore.

[TeMPOraL]

Nice, I'm stealing it! Thanks!

[nwallin]

What are you thanking him for? It was your idea.

Wait. I mean, it was my idea. Why aren't you thanking me? Donate to my Patreon please.

[zzzcpan]

It's just A/B testing happens to align well with being an employee, not caring about the company, the future of the company, only caring to impress your boss short term and then getting promoted or leaving for another company. It's like a perfect selfish short term instrument for that, it doesn't burden you with mid and long term consequences.

But it's actually pretty hard to find something where A/B testing would be appropriate, outside of measuring effectiveness of ads of course, since they are naturally short term and consequence-free.

[birdyrooster]

Here is the source: https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...

[hinkley]

What do you suppose the lifecycle is of something like this?

Does the new owner, under their own power, set about adding ads to their site? Do they install a 3rd party ad tool that does the dirty business? Or does some smooth talker show up and tell them they'll take care of everything for a modest cut of the profits and that person makes a hash of everything?

Because it really does feel to me like there's a certain detachment from the userbase. If the owners are the actors instead of just complicit, maybe they're 'doing us a favor' by showing us how they really feel.

[binarytox1n]

Uh... if you sold it, did you retain the rights to the content in the sale? If not, I'd say your users are going to have to suck it up.

[Blackthorn]

I didn't sell the content, I sold the site.

The content was all licensed to the wiki under CC-BY-SA. So even if I could have legally sold the content, which I couldn't have because I didn't own it, I and my users could fork it however we want.

[Macha]

Nearly all wikis have content licensed under some form of creative commons. e.g. Gamepedia used CC BY-SA for older wikis and CC BY-NC-SA for new ones.