I actually think so, yes, the world would be better off with everything you listed happening.
When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.
Given that companies often spend a significant fraction of their budgets on advertising, I wonder if some products would be cheaper if advertising was banned. Sure, maybe some ad-supported services would be paywalled, but it might end up being a wash in the end.
At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.
Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.
I'd recommend thinking of this (and other accident forgiveness schemes from competitors) as a gesture of goodwill that rarely happens rather than an official part of the billing policy.
If you actually look at your contract, no cloud provider is going to contractually obligate themselves to forgive your bill, and you shouldn't be planning or predicting your bill based on it.
> A license is allowed if Fedora determines that the license is a free software / open source license. At a high level, the inquiry involves determining whether the license provides software freedom, and (equivalently) making sure that the license does not place burdens on users' exercise of its permissions that are inconsistent with evolving community norms and traditions around what is acceptable in a free software / open source license.
The BUSL is on their list of not allowed licenses[2], so I find it highly unlikely your similar "non-commercial use only" license will be permitted.
The trick of selling via Amazon is that although Amazon (and thus the government, if they subpoena'd that info) could easily see you're using Mullvad, they could not figure out which Mullvad account was yours.
Cloudflare's primary raison d'être is messing with the response they serve to users - to perform caching, to inject CAPTCHAs when they detect a DDoS attack, etc.
If you don't trust Cloudflare to not abuse this to inject ads, stop using Cloudflare.
They can mess with response to make redirects/checks before my content is served, but my content is mine they should only cache it and that is it.
If they serve ads on their captcha or some redirect I'd say well it is not nice - but for me fundamental difference is messing with my content even in a good faith - send me a notification an email or stop serving my content if it is active malware but don't change it.
You did, although I have no idea if OP is an affiliate of YC (IANAL but maybe you could argue the public API is a form of sublicensing the data?):
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
> IANAL but maybe you could argue the public API is a form of sublicensing the data?
Given that the license is explicitly identified as both sublicensable and transferable and includes the right to distribute, I have a very hard time seeing how anyone could argue that the recipient of data that YC explicitly exposes through their "Official HN API" isn't allowed to use it.
My data is licensed only to Y Combinator and its affiliated companies (I would have prefer it to be licensed it only for news.ycombinator,com), not any other rando that can access it via a browser or an API
Sematic (OP's employer; rebranded to Airtrain?) is a YC company. Not a lawyer but I assume that would be included in "affiliated" since YC presumably has some ownership of them.
But I do feel saddened and personally betrayed; I thought the licence I gave to YN was just for news.ycombinator.com to store and show my comments, not for any other purposes.
All HN did do was store and show your (public) comments.
What this other company did with that (public) data seems to me to be a separate issue that you should take up with that company, just like the fact that your public comments (which you explicitly gave permission to HN to show) have been indexed by Google, Bing, and probably thousands of other spiders, bots, scrapers, etc.
I'm curious how you expected this to work. Like if you only give HN permission to store and show your comments on the public web, then somehow no other entity out there will be able to do anything with them?
Yes, I expect it to work in the same way instagram works, for example. If a commercial entity started yoinking photos from instagram and using them for commercial purposes, shit will hit the fan.
Again, the fact my user data has been scrapped already doesn't mean it was scrapped legally. I'm ok with HN showing my comments, I'm not ok with anyone else than HN using my user data.
> ommercial entity started yoinking photos from instagram and using them for commercial purposes, shit will hit the fan.
Will it though? I would imagine Meta would block them and then posture with a C&D or a frivolous lawsuit, but if they share the phones you gave them on the public internet, they're publicly consumable right? What law do you feel is broken there?
It's not Meta that would sue them (although they would), it's the copyright owners (the users) that will. Photos or comments, the User retains copyright on their content, and only license it to Meta or YC for specific purposes. Yes, that means Meta/YC and their affiliated companies can use the content for other purposes than displaying it in a browser, but 3rd parties 100% can't.
Well, are you going to sue? Are you going to sue Google and Bing and whoever else? Have you even bothered to contact the people at Airtrain to ask them to remove your content? Have you contacted HN to have them delete your account and comments?
Or are you complaining here (ironically) to make a point, but you don't actually care that much?
Shit hits the fan because Instagram considers user content a golden goose, and they have a vested interest in not letting it get outside their control. Not because they feel a particular obligation to protect user privacy. That's generally been status quo for every social network.
HN cares a lot less; they're a tech comment site and don't actively discourage people using the dataset gleanable from the contents of the site for novel experimentation.
(Sidebar: I see "scrapped" coming up a lot in these conversations these days. Where is that neologism coming from? I'm familiar with people calling it "scraping" but it seems like the term has drifted for some reason?)
Anyone could (in a technical sense) scrape HN or access the data through the API and do whatever they want with it. It's unclear to me whether the license granted to HN by your use of the site gives someone doing so license to your comments (I suspect not but IANAL) but the general argument here is that this would fall under fair use. Certainly that seems the case if they didn't display the dataset itself. I'm not sure how it would fair though given they are displaying the content.
The difference is expectations - people buying professional cameras expect and are used to needing to buy additional gear. In this case, "shot on iPhone" is obviously intended to deceive consumers into believing something that isn't true.
Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but
- TV was twice the cost
- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription
- All news was paywalled
- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist
- etc etc
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