jadero

I don’t know if this counts but I’m one of those nutters who has no images on either. Just pure black screens.

Come to think of it, maybe they are images. I remember taking a photo with the lens completely covered for something…

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the form of capitalism that’s about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.

I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We’ve had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It’s been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it’s become more difficult. :)

Former water treatment plant operator. Thanks for living up to your name.

We’ve been watching an old TV series called “One Step Beyond.” I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It’s written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use “One Step Beyond” as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the “One Step Beyond” our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.

I know I’ll tire of it eventually, but for now I’m enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.

Given the number of offenses I see in books and magazines, I’d say that the only thing left is for the descriptivist grammarians and lexicographers to record it.

That sounds like the kind of thing I envision.

Yes, no personalized data collection. Both sides of the ad transaction would need to track something if the placement had some kind of impressions or click-through payment system. It’s been a while since I’ve managed a website, but I think most of that can be handled with pretty basic logging that has existed since before micro-targeted advertising was even conceived.

For a simple placement contract like we have with what few newspapers remain, the ad supplier could assess the value of the placement for themselves using standard referrer logs. Not paying its way? Don’t renew the placement.

My experimentation suggests that your inbox is kind of read-only. The only way to reply or vote is to go back to the top level thread.

I have some concerns over that. Unless there is something I’m missing, there is no reason for your inbox to be anything other than a filtered view of the communities where you’ve commented. As such, you should be able to do anything in your inbox that you can do anywhere else.

I could be completely out to lunch, though. My programming career ended over a decade ago and I have not done anything that resembles a formal analysis.

There are ways to do advertising that works and is not annoying (or at least less annoying). Context advertising are ads that are directly related to the subject matter of interest. For example, ads from companies that are in the business of meeting the needs of the boatbuilding community would be welcome or at least tolerated in a boatbuilding community. Those same ads shown to a programming community would be less welcome, even if there happens to be significant shared membership.

For example, the paper magazine “Small Craft Advisor” recently transitioned to online only via Substack. It didn’t take long for subscribers to actually complain about the loss of advertising and SCA had to respond with self-promotion articles from former advertisers.

Context advertising requires no user profiling, no user tracking, and no data collection. “Oh, you sell epoxy (or sails or plans)? Well here is a community (as distinct from a user profile) that is likely looking for what you sell and probably already discussing products in your line of business.”

Put BBS discussion boards, FidoNet groups, and Usenet out front and drop Fark for my path. Along with a variety of standalone forums and random stuff that never went anywhere, of course :) (yes, I’m old!)