With some distance from Exiled I find the following things amusing, in no particular order.
You still think it’s enough of a deal that I banned you on Exiled that you feel the need to bring it up here almost every time you respond to me.
You think I cared about not being invited to a distro and slack channel I knew nothing about until months later. Cuse started Exiled so quickly after the purge I assumed it was all the same thing as your PM.
You think if I had been in on the emails and slack channel I would have had any different views about what was going on than I did. I would have urged any material discussions to be put into a thread for the community to be aware of.
I went back and re-read some of those old messages and that Modest Proposal thread and nothing I’ve seen here changes the opinions I had there. I still hope this becomes a site where you can hang out with people you like and post interesting stuff. I still hope that major decisions about the site are made with the input of anyone in the community who wants to chime in. And I’m still not interested in working with you on anything.
You emailed me twice on April 19th about the distro, once saying that you wanted to be added and then “sounds good” after I told you I’d make sure it was ok with the people already on the list to share their email addresses with you. The next day was when Cuse started Exiled and the distro ended.
Maybe you meant “knew nothing about” only in terms of the slack channel? Dunno. But you were invited to the distro, it just became obsolete right away. And on Exiled you absolutely went ape shit about secret conversations about ownership very nearly putting the kibosh on anything happening about the site at all.
whoa, watch out, you better do like 50 hours of coding for a DNS FTP QRZ otherwise your contributions to this site, and therefore your opinion about it, means nothing, and you will be denigrated as an asshole by people who are doing very important computer stuff, way more important than creating content. the computer people here are so much more important than the content creators, who honestly can drop dead, feel free to tell them to fuck off at any time, nobody needs them.
I feel similarly to microbet. I’d be perfectly happy to have conservative ads be dropped if there is a decent consensus for it. But I don’t think we should do that just because a couple people have demand it. Other people have already expressed opinions in favor of keeping them, and a whole bunch of people haven’t expressed any opinion at all.
The loudest voices in the room often don’t represent represent the majority view. I think it is more fair to the rest of the community solicit clear opinions from as many people as possible rather than doing, well, what’s in the post above, for example.
I’ll also note that “conservative ads” isn’t a category we can block. We can block all political ads. We can play whack-a-mole and block individual ads as they appear. We can block ads from specific domains/organizations. Or we could try to find out which of the 3,532 ad networks (not a joke, that’s how many there currently are on AdSense) tend to show right wing political content.
And fwiw, many of the Trump ads aren’t even listed as being political. They often fall under the categories of ‘Sensationalism’ or ‘Get Rich Quick’.
IMO it shouldn’t take a majority to get rid of ads that some users find offensive/annoying/off-putting etc. I don‘t know where to draw the line but if (for the sake of argument) a third or a quarter of the community asks for something they should be accommodated if it doesn’t negatively affect the rest of the community. The caveat, of course, being that it is within reason and doesn’t demand a disproportionate amount of effort,
I agree, there’s no way we’ll ever get half the community to even vote on an issue. I’m not asking for that exactly, but I am asking for a little help from people who want specific changes to show wider support for what they want and not a lot of opposition. I’d also request people try to understand there may be limitations and repercussions to their requests. For example:
Currently, ads labeled as ‘Politics’, ‘Sensationalism’, and ‘Get Rich Quick’ comprise 20.5%, 17.5% and 4.5% of our income, respectively, while only appearing 12.1%, 6.8% and 2.4% of the time. Those categories punch far above their weight. If we only run “good” ads that people like (which is a super weird concept to me), it’s going to put a significant hit on our pretty meager income.
Also, we’re on Google’s ad network, not whatever bottom barrel source 2+2 uses. Google’s definition of ‘Get Rich Quick’ is for crap like annuities, and ‘Sensationalism’ just means IS TRUMP A GOOD PRESIDENT CLICK HERE. We’re not talking outright scams or ads for porn.
Now obviously generating the most income isn’t the only qualification and there are limits. We’re already not showing NRA ads even though they probably pay very well. But I think it’s a much bigger ask to not show ads for conservative political causes when we’re a politics discussion site and the most popular thread is constantly being spammed by Trump’s Twitter bot.
Gonna bump this thread with an update and invite yet another round of abuse.
If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen any ads lately it is not because anybody has made a decision to stop showing them, it’s because we’re waiting for Google to review the site (which takes several eternities), and also because we’re transitioning from microbet as the treasurer who had the ad account in his name, to spidercrab as treasurer who would vastly prefer not to be directly involved in any advertising. Additional details to come soon, hopefully.
My understanding is that he doesn’t want to be responsible for setting anything up or making any advertising decisions, but is comfortable having financial accounts in his name. However, there really hasn’t been much discussion about this that I’ve seen so my understanding may be inaccurate and I don’t want to speak for him.
There’s likely a larger conversation for the community to have at some point. For now I’m just explaining why the ads went away.
So, now that I’m no longer an admin or treasurer I want to revisit ads and see what people want done. I’m just bumping this for more comments and then after a new chance for comment, I (or someone else may want to do this) will try some polls.
We could keep things more or less as is. Perhaps AdSense isn’t going to be the right ad service. Google may be sneaky enough that it punishes us for saying mean things about advertising. Who knows? There are competitors. We could use a service like this and maybe have a thread for ads or types of ads that we want to prohibit.
Or, and this is what I’d like to do, we could work something out where we directly sell ads. This may require an ad manager or we may be able to work something out where any member can find sponsors.
Or we could have no ads at all.
Or we could have just no ads for donors.
Anyway, discuss for a bit…at some point some voting.