I can't think of too many pieces of software that have improved my life as significantly as uBlock Origin in the last decade. It's been an absolute godsend.
It's actually a substantive money saver in a shared compute environment. Running Windows RDS or VDA solutions, you can actually watch CPU and RAM reductions across the board by deploying uBlock Origin.
The "this is a huge waste of energy in scamming people" argument deployed against cryptocurrency is also valid for traditional spam, and most web advertising, it's just that it's not so visible any more. Google must have a datacenter worth of computers doing classification on email.
Courthouse i'm in has obviously locked browser extensions but there's no adblock.. i can't help but see ublock's logo in the toolbar and imagine how much bandwidth that frail network would grab back if it was there.
I don’t install anything on my work computer that I can’t say 100% is used for work so I could never justify uBlock. It does make a HUGE difference. The web without it is a giant mess.
I only used the web for work, nothing else. I didn't use my company email for newsgroups and website signups I used my Hotmail account instead that kept the spam there.
I have never used an ad blocker and have resisted installing it many times. My thinking always was: I'd rather have a web with ads than a web in which I have to pay for content and sign up to 800 different websites with 800 different accounts.
A website that I've frequented a lot, the German news website spiegel.de, has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore. I am not saying that's the fault of ad blockers, but it certainly didn't help.
I don't think we should reward a business model which relies on the premise that humans like to watch ads. I never had someone tell me to drive slower because they wanted to take a closer look at a billboard. Never had I had to rewind a video because someone missed an ad. etc... etc...
Let's be honest. If someone told you to do any of the above things regularly and consistently, you would question their sanity.
But somehow it's normal for businesses to assume people like to watch ads and make it their primary income revenue. Well, sure, some companies succeeded using this model. But I don't see why this should result in me paying more attention to ads.
I don't hold the extremist position that all ads are bad or should be abolished. I have always tried to ignore ads. Adblockers automate what I normally do. And if your business model relies on me watching your ads, maybe you should reconsider your assumptions.
That premise is false. There's always money to be made by selling people's attention. They'd put ads under people's eyelids if they could. People who open up their wallets and spend money are worth even more money to advertisers. The more you pay, the more ads they want to subject you to.
The only way to get rid of them is to deny them any attention at all. They are not entitled to it under any circumstances. Drive their return on investment as close to zero as possible.
The other point to be made here is that the average revenue per user for even the most successful advertising companies (e.g. Google) is less than $1/day. That's not a huge amount of money even for someone with a low income. (From a first-world perspective. Incomes are lower in other parts of the world, but so are advertising revenues from users there.)
So the amount you would have to pay to deliver the same revenues to creators as advertising does is not very much. Especially if we could cut out the middle man so that all of what you pay goes to the content creator.
That's the biggest problem we have right now. You have someone write a news article, a million people read it, it cost you maybe a thousand dollars to write (assuming it's well-researched and not garbage clickbait), so to recover your costs you need one tenth of one cent per user.
We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?
Fix that and you can sustainably pay <$300 and not have to see any ads all year.
> We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?
Monero is a good currency but a really bad investment. That's probably a good thing too. If its price remains stable relative to USD, we can start developing the habit of pricing everything in XMR instead. I've gotten paid in XMR for writing some quick code, it works pretty well. Now we just need to get people to sell oil barrels for XMR.
Looks like Monero hasn't been pumping or dumping quite as much as other cryptocurrencies, maybe that means its creators actually care about making it useful as currency rather than as a medium for ~~scams~~ "investments"
I'd love an ad-free future, but something tells me that there'll always just be too much pressure to make more ads. Hell, Amazon is pumping $10,000,000 per episode into a TV show that's arguably just a big ad for Amazon (subscribe to our TV service to watch this show, buy some socks and video games while you're here)
Yeah. The cryptocurrency space does have a lot of scams, especially coins created on top of ETH and BNB. However, there's a lot of good projects as well. Monero is everything bitcoin was supposed to have been. I think it's insane how people are wasting energy on bitcoin mining. That energy would be better spent securing Monero.
There will always be pressure to advertise. No matter what product or service you have or how profitable it is, you can always make even more money by selling your user's attention. That's why we need technology that makes it impossible to advertise to us. A browser extension that deletes elements, a video filter that deletes brands, augmented reality glasses that deletes billboards.
The sole advantage that I'll grant ad-funded services is that they tend to far more open-access than the alternatives. Bill Gates and homeless people get the same features from Facebook. The rich subsidize the poor without ever having to actually open their wallet.
Ads are still a net negative, but it's worth considering that requiring payment will price some people out, because the poor aren't usually subsidized with paid services.
Of course people watch ads. It is (or used to be#one reason outdoor watch the Superbowl. The world would actually be a boring place without ads. The problem is when they are over done or deliver malware.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I liked the old internet where people posted content out of passion not for money. The quality has suffered and many think they have a right to get paid.
Probably there is even more content like that as there are more people in the internet. But we can't find the good content in the mountain of trash that we are drowning in.
EDIT: can -> can't
It would be a lot safer if ad companies vetted their ads responsibly. After a third case of an ad on a perfectly reputable site trying to exploit my browser, an ad-blocker became just a standard part of network hygiene.
Every culture has a version of the children's story, such as "the goose that laid the golden egg." Somebody is given a machine that can produce seemingly unlimited wealth, and they use it without restraint until it breaks down and leaves them bankrupt.
I'd be fine with an ad-based internet if ads didn't impact performance so much. All of the ad network scripts require heaps more resources and bandwidth, and that's before accounting for malware!
I find this quite more complex than that. This is not just a different revenue source, it's a different business model.
If you don't click on ads, you don't bring any money so you night as well install an adblocker.
When your revenue source is ads, it becomes a conflicting content with your own content. You need people to stop paying attention to your content, lool at ads and deciding to leave your site for it. Ads network can also have an say on your content by controling your income source.
Paying a news website directly brings them independance and allows the site to focus on content, those 2 things are at the core of journalism.
If I were you, I would reconsider a subscription if you really liked the spiegel.
I on the other hand would prefer that all the commercial websites were honest about what they charge instead of trying to profit off manipulating me into spending money elsewhere.
The idea that there would be no open content on the web without ads is ridiculuous. Most content on the web, like the comments in this discussion, is "user"-generated and the users generating it are typically not paid at all. While less visible in search engines, there are still many websites - personal or otherwise - that have no profit motive and are provided without any charge or ads. Its not uncommon for them to get posted here.
And even for content that you'd want to pay for, ads are a bad way to pay for it because the cost to you (or the average person) is much greater than what the content creator gets out of the deal. Meanwhile, the incentives for ad-supported content creators and users are not really aligned payment is based entirely on engagement rather than any judgement of what value the user gets out of the content. There is so much spam that provides no value to the web (e.g. because the content is literally copied from elsewhere) but still exists because some people may land on the page and end up viewing ads. So many user-hostile features designed to keep users spending as much time as possible on ad-laden website.
Now back to spiegel.de you say you frequented it a lot. Does that not mean that you got any value out of it that you are willing to pay for? If not, is not being able to use it anymore really such a problem?
I feel completely to opposite, though admittedly I am a hardliner on ads (I think they're a scourge). I make every effort to eliminate and automate them out of my life. Some things I'll pay for, others I'll ad block, and others I'll simply eliminate.
Our lives are filled with so much which seeks to ensure we're constantly passively on autopilot, consistently following the path of least resistance. Putting a paywall in front of something forces you to really assess - "does this really offer me any value? Do I really want to be doing it?".
If it's not something you're willing to go through the motions to pay for, there's probably something more personally fulfilling you could be doing with your time.
The web is filled with so much rubbish that is "just good enough" to get users to sit through ads. I couldn't care less if all that ad-supported dreck goes under. In fact I'd welcome it.
You can take a look at american television to see how that works. There are more ads than actual content, and the quality of the content is... well, you be the judge of that.
If someone says they won't do something because they can't pay the bills unless they finance it via ad revenue, I'm fine with that. I'm not convinced that the world is losing any value because of this. (Or put it in another way: would Gabriel Garcia Marquez have written One Hundred Years of Solitude, had he not received ad-revenue for it?)
On the other hand, while I'm extremely happy I don't have to watch random Google cr*p adverts before/during/after Youtube videos thanks to adblock, if the creator itself includes an advert in his/her video I usually watch it. That is acceptable to me, and more direct support than just unrelated ads.
I recently changed my YouTube app to one that skips creator ads. I am sure I saved way over a few hours in the last week's plus I really don't care about VPNs and mobile games. That time was 100% wasted before.
Nothing prevents a website from putting up ads relevant to its content, or ads that are generic enough that don't require tracking of their userbase's age/gender/marital status/what they had for lunch.
But if websites insist on doing this under the illusion that they can monetize their userbase to the last penny, then it's only fair for its users not to allow it and force the website into being more explicit about the monetization - via a paywall.
> has converted to pay only mostly, and i now can't use it anymore
You could, but you're not willing to pay for it. Fair enough. But a significant number of their userbase is now telling them that they're not ready to pay using their personal info. That's good feedback that their users have provided using an adblocker.
There's an alternative solution that enables people to produce content that doesn't require them to make an income through advertising or subscriptions.
It can be accomplished through higher taxes and a universal basic income.
Essentially: ensure that all people on earth have their basic needs met. A lot of people will produce incredible creative work, and it has been shown time and time again that government support of artists incubates incredible art.
How much UBI could we realistically afford right now? Keeping in mind that there'd be an incredibly huge reduction in economic productivity, since pretty much everyone hates working
I'm guessing we could actually keep people fed, but I'm wondering if we'd end up living in really crappy shacks without first world quality utilities
I dunno if I'd want a UBI utopia if it requires a 1700s-quality lifestyle
> Keeping in mind that there'd be an incredibly huge reduction in economic productivity, since pretty much everyone hates working
Would there be? There would certainly be some changes. Less desirable jobs would have to pay more. People would have more power to demand better working conditions. But the idea that the majority of beople would just be fine with "basic income" and then sit on their ass all day instead of trying to earn more to afford whatever shinies they want or just because there is something they enjoy doing. There are also a ton of bullshit jobs that really do not contribute anything - freeing up those people to do whatever they want might have a positive effect.
Eventually humanity will get to a point where automation can provide all of your needs as well as maintain that automation. On our way there, the hours worked per person should be going down.
> a web in which I have to pay for content and sign up to 800 different websites with 800 different accounts
I can assure you that there will never be a future where that happens. Even if everyone that uses a browser installed an adblocker right now and never removed it again, if every website was paywalled, they would have to choose between closing down or unpaywalling again. Because as you say, you, and everyone else isn't going to pay to use every individual website that they visit.
Browsing the Web of 2021 with a mobile hotspot on a desktop is impossible without an ad blocker. There is so much shit on web pages now that: (a) site assume you're on a desktop and have infinite bandwidth, (b) on a mobile connection the pages take forever to complete, and (c) the pages use up all of your mobile data allowance.
I'm ethically against taking money away from people who want to generate revenue through advertising, but I have no choice if I want to view the content at all.
> I'm ethically against taking money away from people who want to generate revenue through advertising
Why do you say that? They're the ones who sent you HTML for free. They assumed you'd look at the ads, but you have absolutely zero moral obligation to validate that assumption. If you have a magazine, you can totally rip out the ads and throw them in the trash. If you have a newspaper, you can cut out the articles you care about and discard everything else.
Use the ad blocker and be proud. If anything, you're helping free the web from the scourge that is advertising. If they want money, they're totally free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of serving a free web page.
The assumption is that most are not ripping the ads out of the magazine without seeing them at all. The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it.
You can make all sorts of loose statements like this then draw the line where you feel it’s wrong. It will still be arbitrary.
To continue stretching examples. Developers chose to release software as is. Through some combo of your reasoning above, is it okay to pirate/crack software? Most of the time HNers will be against software piracy but for blocking ads.
I care more about the obvious social contracts in place and the obviousness of creators are supporting what they created by showing ads or charging for their software.
Another example was people getting mad at someone for wanting to split a Stratchery subscription. One big point was it’s against the TOS. Some of those people surely block ads and would not care if TOSs say you can’t. I actually find the Stratchery situation sympathetic because I believe the person was unemployed. Similarly if you have a super old computer or limited data dude to financial constraints. Yeah, that is an exception where the morals make sense.
However going against Stratchery, a pretty small time operation by splitting the cost amongst some people for one login is obviously not cool for the average middle class on up person.
> If they want money, they're free to return HTTP 402 Payment Required.
This is not true in the real world. The amount of backlash you can get for doing that will almost never be worth it. False positives are an issue as well.
Similarly, software that requires you to always be online and aggressively verifies you have paid for said software which ends up creating some friction, is frowned upon too.
Or Stratchery suspending you or sending similar headers for logging in via IPs far from one another. The false positives would be lead to a Streisand Effect
Print ads don't have any security risks, they don't track you, they're less distracting, and they don't cost you anything extra like bandwidth. I think your analogy might hold up if ads on the web weren't so intrusive.
The analogy doesn’t need to be perfect. Every excuse can be used. Others can have excuses for why they morally believe pirating software developed by you, your friends, etc, is warranted. The end result is still having your work being used without compensation.
I don't see not viewing ads on websites for products I'll never buy as equivalent to pirating software, especially considering the additional costs of compromised security, bandwidth, etc, but it's something to think about.
I'm in the camp where I'd gladly pay a fair cost to use a site, if there were a standard way to do so. The challenge here is that many people only view any given site on an ad hoc basis rather than being a devotee who's willing to pay for a subscription. If someone figures out how to solve this, especially the UI and adoption aspects, they'll be a billionaire.
>> The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it
This is the antithesis of what I want the internet to be, so opt me out of that, please, because I'm going to come hither and taketh in that which I care to taketh in, that and nothing else.
People forget that browsers are called user agents because they are supposed to operate on behalf of the user. That includes displaying the content how the user wants it and not how the server operator wants it.
Aren’t computers mean to be used the way the computer owner and user wants it to be used?
Then there should be no problem for HNers who block all ads if hypothetically some situation comes out where all paid software and SaaS is able to be used freely on a person’s computing device. Since they should operate on the person’s behalf.
I doubt most HNers who directly or indirectly work on software/SaaS/apps, and live off that income, would be cool with this.
Right. So if there comes a day soon where every single online subscription service and SaaS is able to be used for free, we should be able to use all of it for free. The browsers exist to serve us. Not what some view as abusive business models.
I’d still be interested to know if you would be fine with pirating/getting around all paywalls and all SaaS app logins, and all other paid online things with the basis of the browser is there to serve us.
Whenever this stuff comes up on HN. there’s the initial bits of anti ad self righteousness but never a continuation to see if the general ethos continues outside ads.
My purpose of all this is to point out the inherent hypocrisy. Not every ad has spyware or adware. Are those ads unblocked? No. I understand it would take far too much time to unblock specific ads. Which doesn’t help the point of being morally in the right.
Same with disagreeing with being able to crack/pirate all paywalls and SaaS subscriptions, et al. If the browser is to serve you.
Sure that’s cool. If you develop software for a company. Or any one you know develops software and charges for it. I hope you’re equally okay with you or your friends livelihoods going away if all people decide to think like you and find charging for any software to be the antithesis of what. They want the world to be. Usually this isn’t the case.
> The assumption and social contract was the page is sent to you with ads and you take in all of it.
Nobody ever signed any social contract. You can't even navigate to the page's actual terms of service without being subjected to ads and surveillance capitalism. As if anyone even reads those terms to begin with.
Their invalid assumptions are their problem. Nobody else needs to worry about this. It's their business model, it's up to them to make it work. If they send us ads, we're gonna delete them. It's up to them to deal with that fact.
> is it okay to pirate/crack software?
Of course. DRM is a defect and cracks literally fix products. "Pirates" have the superior version of the software. You'd think it would be the other way around. Pretty sad.
> Most of the time HNers will be against software piracy but for blocking ads.
I'm against copyright itself. "Piracy" is not a concept that should even exist. It's how things would naturally be without the illusions provided by copyright.
I should not have used software. I should have said apps, software, and services. Copyright is not what I was thinking of. I was including SaaS and so on in my thinking when I wrote my comment.
So take out copyright. Any charging of any digital service, subscription, et al, can have similar morally backed reasons to get around paying + getting everyone to get around paying. Off top of head. World is inherently unfair. Being poor is unfair. Charging money for digital subscriptions keeps the rich, rich. Keeps poor people out. We should be for figuring out how to get around all digital payments for digital services + subscriptions.
> nobody ever signed a social contract
That’s not how social contracts work. Social contracts aren’t meant to be signed. There’s no signed contract for person A to do any of the following in public: not to purposefully smell bad enough to have peoples gag reflexes kick in, for Person A not to repeatedly throw up in their hands and very dramatically repeatedly consume it all again, or for person A to laugh to themselves and loudly comment to themselves about how ugly or silly or { insert any other negativity } people near them are.
I can give other examples that are digitally focused too.
in general nearly all people adhere to a number of social contracts and expect the same of others.
Not at all. This is something I'm passionate about.
Copyright made sense before computers existed. Back then it was still possible to infringe copyright. For example, people could copy books by hand. However, the scale of such operations was small. To operate at massive scales you had to be a major industry player and own machinery such as printing presses. It's trivial to enforce copyright against such huge targets. Therefore, artificial scarcity was easy to create and it made sense.
Fast forward to the 21st century. Networked computers exist and everything is data. Filling up an entire hard drive with copies is as easy as copy paste. It's trivial to duplicate information and transmit data to other computers. People now have worldwide networked computers in their pockets. People now infringe copyright on a massive scale without even realizing what they are doing simply because technology has changed the way people perceive copyrighted works. Nobody really thinks before downloading stuff and sending it to their friends even though this is unauthorized copying and therefore copyright infringement. Nobody thinks before editing some picture and making a funny meme out of it even though it's a derivative work. Nobody thinks before reposting someone else's work on social media. Copyright infringement has become natural.
The truth is computers make a mockery of copyright. The fundamental notion behind copyright is artificial scarcity. Computers make data infinitely abundant. It's incredibly subversive technology. Before computers you needed expensive hardware and logistics to produce and distribute a million books or a million records. With computers it's a trivial task. The world has been changed forever and there's no way to go back.
They're definitely trying to rewind the clock though. To create artificial scarcity of data in the 21st century, free computing must be destroyed. We must not be allowed to run arbitrary software or make our own software. Hacking as we know it must come to an end. They must lock down computers so that we can only run software they approve, software that obeys them instead of us, software that only copies when they authorize. This is completely aligned with government interests in banning civilian use of cryptography.
I say computers are too important to allow them to become mere tools of aging industries and oppressive governments. Copyright makes no sense in the 21st century, it's time to abolish it. The alternative is to give up our computing freedom. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than live in such a bleak future.
Copyright is also a tool that corporations use against other countries via political pressure by the US government. These corporations are extremely rich, they can afford to lobby the US government to the point it applies pressure on foreign nations. I've posted about this before:
I wish I could find one particular news article I remember reading years ago. It was about some MPAA official who came to my country to lobby the government on their copyright interests. Some journalist approached him and asked him point blank if he thought this should be a priority in a country that fails to offer even basic infrastructure such as sanitation to its entire population. Obviously he had no response.
Copyright holders also lobby governments in order to extend copyright duration indefinitely. They have effectively robbed us all of our public domain rights. I've written about this before too:
Again to clarify I am including SaaS, paywalls, subscriptions, everything. When I say pirating. I may be using the wrong word. My bad. Are you fine with everything code related having work arounds? I’m not familiar enough with copyright to know how it relates to getting around a SaaS monthly subscription.
I wouldn't mind ads if there was any resemblance of self-restraint what they put on there. But yes, the web has become absolutely unbearable without blockers. I guess some big sites were always bad, but now just everything is plastered.
I recently used Youtube with all the ads for the first time in a long while and its just abhorrent. From extremely low quality minutes long text-to-speech ads, some that make questionable/dangerous (and in my country illegal) health claims, videos getting interrupted more often than in the old tv days to entire sponsored music videos played before the music I actually wanted to listen to.
Maybe it is some wicked engagement strategy so people have to constantly pay attention and skip ads manually every few minutes instead of being able to just let YouTube run in the background on autoplay ...
Two things about YouTube: (1) they are different to most sites in that they'll let you pay to remove the ads (which I do), but (2) for some reason all the ads they showed me I actually found very useful and were for products I genuinely wanted - if I had infinite time in my life I would have watched the ads, but I don't, so (1).
I'm with you on the last part. I've avoided using an Adblocker for years and finally caved in a few weeks ago.
I've always wanted an opt-in blocker. One that is off by default but on the worst offender sites can be turned on by the click of a button. This has never been possible easily but I haven't looked in around five years.
Yeah, it's one of those life-changing projects. It's so important and trusted that it should actually be integrated into the browsers themselves so that it can do its job even more effectively. Sadly, conflicts of interest prevent that. It should probably come pre-installed with every browser instead.
I wish iOS Firefox had support for it. Seems Apple doesn't allow extensions. I told all my friends about uBlock Origin but so many of them use iPhones. I still install it on every browser I come across and everyone is happy with it.
I wish there was a uBlock app for iOS, similar to other ad-blockers that are available on iOS. I'd be willing to pay for such an app and be able to use any browser on iOS (including FF) w/o worrying about ads.
The new AdGuard iOS beta has a web extension component and it is now very close to ublock in terms of functionality. So it’s coming soon. Between AdGuard and NextDNS I don’t see hardly any ads.
I was surprised to see how crappy the internet has become when I accidentally left my pihole disabled the other day. Maybe we should just reset it (the internet)? Start over with a new kind of browser without ads, extensions, no JS, no CSS etc.. just a dumb renderer. The current bloat is getting embarrassing.
Pi-Hole is blocking so much telemetry in my phone that I am honestly afraid of using it outside my network. I don't even take internet with me, because I want my phone to be somewhat safe as the only reason I have one are banking apps and authentifications.
No donations should result in no expectations, but unfortunately all sorts of people will have all sorts of expectations from you when you release an open-source project, donations or not.
Let's not take to a literal extreme the OP's simplified expression. It's a matter of degree, like almost everything in life.
Money is not the only source of responsibility. Most responsibilities in life are not a consequence of payment - from one perspective, payment-for-services exists to fill gaps in other responsibilities, to create artificial responsibility.
In gorhill's situation, speaking generally from my perspective (and not for gorhill), payment would seem to increase responsibility but it would not be absolute: People shut down for-profit businesses all the time. Users could be paying for gorhill's expenses in creating the existing software, which would imply no future obligation. And lack of payment doesn't eliminate responsibility: If you tell people you are going to do something, and they depend on you, you have some responsibility. Did gorhill promise to maintain it forever? No, but they aren't providing software for use today only; it's not like watching a TikTok video; software assumes longer-term use.
I've done a similar thing with a few past employers after I've moved on. "Hey, can you explain this code to the new person?". In some cases, I'd be glad to do a 1 hour call or whatever. They frequently ask me to submit a bill for my time and I always refuse. I don't want to turn into some kind of staff augmentation and be at their beck and call "because they are paying". Way better to think of it as a gift and I get to decide the rules.
I generally would do the same thing. I'm amazed at all the hostility towards this. And most importantly, it doesn't read to me like you're being taken for a ride. Much better to help if you want, dictate your terms, generate good will and maintain the relationship etc than get a few hundred dollars, unless you're actually trying to make a living that way. Even from a purely selfish perspective, long term you're approach will serve you much better than trying to be transactional about ever interaction you have. And obviously you could always just say no if you didn't want to do it.
Exactly, I've never spent more than 5 hours on a previous company doing this. However, it allows me to not burn bridges and one of the reasons it never goes beyond 5 hours is that this approach doesn't lead to a situation where I am "working for them".
sounds more like you are uncomfortable billing your market value, like most of us - you should charge at least a day’s worth of your old (or current) salary for one hour of this kind of on-demand work. If they don’t want to pay, that’s great, it means it really wasn’t that important after all…
No, there is real psychological research behind this.
If you charge people for something, it kicks their perception of the act into a different category. That in turn effects how they think about the interaction and what their sense of entitlement and expectations are in ways that can be counter-intuitive.
They found that when daycares fined parents for picking up their kids late, the result was parents picking them up even later. Because, without the fine, parents treated the pick-up time as a moral/social obligation that they did not want to uphold. Once the fine was introduced, they treated this as a simple financial transaction where if it's worth it to pay the extra to pick them up later, why not?
What you're skipping is that it was a tiny fine. $3 per incident! Small amounts of money can be really distorting that way. Paying a full day's salary for the consultation is not the same, and it's pretty likely it would increase the company's respect of their time.
Sure, it was a small fine (NIS 10 per incident per child) but keep in mind:
- Israel has the highest fertility rate in the developed world (3.1 children per mother on average)
- The average gross monthly salary at the time of the study was NIS 5,595
- If the average parent comes late 4 times a month, that's 4 * 3.1 * 10 = NIS 124 = 2.2% of their monthly salary, or the majority of an entire day's pay (!) - that's not nothing.
That said, there are two interesting conclusions from the paper. Firstly, the well known one:
> Parents may have interpreted the action of the teachers in the first period as a generous, nonmarket activity. They may have thought: "The contract with the day-care center only covers the period until four in the afternoon. After that time, the teacher is just a nice and generous person. I should not take advantage of her patience." The introduction of the fine changes the perception into the following: "The teacher is taking care of the child in much the same way as she did earlier in the day. In fact this activity has a price (which is called a ‘fine’). Therefore, I can buy this service as much as needed."
But there's also this:
> The behavior in the third period, however, is still difficult to explain. Now the first social norm would predict a low level of delay. We may think that a period of 4 weeks is not sufficient to bring the behavior back to the appropriate level. But considering that 2 or 3 weeks had been enough to double the level of delays after the introduction of the fine, we should estimate that the learning rate of the parents is too fast to justify so much inertia. Perhaps a third social norm is needed: "Once a commodity, always a commodity." This norm and second clause of the first norm explain the behavior in the final period: a commodity at zero price is bought in large quantities. Overall, three norms seem necessary to explain three facts.
This is my thinking as well. Sometimes cooperation makes life easier in the long run than competition. Since I help my coworkers without asking for anything in return they do the same for me when I'm stuck. That way nobody is afraid to ask for help, nobody is left behind on deadlines and we all get decent performance reviews.
I do a similar thing when a friend asks me a favor that is going to take enough of my time, think the classic "Can you help me build my PC?" or "Something has happened to my computer! Can you fix it?"
If I'm helping then I refuse any kind of money. I don't give guarantees or service like a business does, I don't want money like a business does. I do often ask that they try to learn from the experience, I'll gladly explain everything I'm doing.
The other option is I refuse, for whatever reason that is.
This keeps my choices those of a friend and my responsibilities those of a friend. I like keeping them that way.
I am not taking raw money with friends either. But when it's assistance I can't offer virtually, i.e. when I need to drive to them in person, then I expect them to order pizza to eat together in return after the job's done. It brings the point across that my time's not free, but it's not as unpersonal as handing over a Euro bill. One can also have a nice chat while eating.
Not the original person you asked but I do the same thing and I would buy them a new one if I damage it. I'm confident that I'm not going to damage their things.
And if it's something where I'm not confident, or its not replaceable / way too expensive, that's when I'll decline. But typical computer repair or building is really easy and safe. Need help delidding your CPU or some other uncommon thing? I'll give advice but I'm not handling it.
There’s a lot of debate on this. So here is my spin. Charge them $1000 to not turn up. Why? Because by not turning up they get used to figuring it out without you which is long term more valuable for resilience and beneficial to them.
There's a difference in doing someone a small polite favor and doing unpaid labor. I definitely have previous employers to whom I'd give an hour of my time to sort out a quick issue, and for a lone hour it is not worth generating an invoice and dealing with taxes. At most I might accept a meal or a pint.
In my books doing a favour to the old coworker is much more worth than writing an invoice for one hour of “consulting”. They’ll be grateful and owe you a favour.
I totally agree. I'm sure there's a significant number of us that have landed wonderful, well-paid jobs thanks to former co-workers. That's totally worth a few hours of unpaid support for a former employer.
It may also cost you your current job if you take money.
Most employment contracts have stipulations about working for competitors. They're rarely enforced, but you can sometimes get caught out if something goes pear-shaped.
If you haven't taken any money, it's a lot harder to hang this on you.
Theoretically the same applies to Kickstarter. Supposedly it is not a pre-order platform, but everyone treats it that way and gets all bent out of shape if the reward never materializes.
Kickstarter can claim to be whatever it wants, but if I say if you give me $2,000 I'll do my best to delivermagical super shoes...
And I end up taking all the money and spending it a 2-month trip to Canada,I've sort of done something wrong. No matter what Kickstarter says, you can definitely be sued if you take someone's money and don't deliver what you promised.
I absolutely loved Kickstarter when it came out, but I don't think I've donated any money to any Kickstarter just because it's more stressful to try and keep track of whenever the hell I'm supposed to get my product.
Amazon and eBay are full of useless things I can get delivered tomorrow, why go on Kickstarter and wait 3 months or even a year?
I backed a few Kickstarters where the creator just ran off with money and quit.
Their is a ton of pressure to over promise, take Code Hero.
I checked out the free demo and loved it enough to back it. Then the creator promised a bunch of infeasible things, like teaching you how to make an online game. The original goal , show off basic programming, was solid.
Right after the campaign ended, the project disappeared.
I'm working on my own game now. And while I might let people pay what they want for a demo of it, I'm not going to promise a bunch of stuff I can't realistically do in order to fundraise.
Not quite the same. Kickstarter does require projects to commit to delivering whatever they promised to backers at the time of the contribution as long as the project is fully funded. They themselves aren't going to process refunds, but you do have a legal avenue if you really want your money back, which isn't the case for any random donation.
We need a tor donate. People pour into a global sink, and the money gets wired to a pool of most useful projects. So nobody can have ill feelings toward on thing in particular.
Gorhill has to me always been a beacon of integrity. I always feel a bit uneasy about browser add-ons and the people in control of them and I am really thankful for not having a single worry about installing ublock origin on any browser I spend some time in.
That's unrelated to donations. One can accept donations without putting their soul on sale.
As an extension developer I get offers for buying my extensions or adding donator-specific functionality: I just don't accept them, even though I accept simple donations/sponsorships. The extension is still free of ads (except in the readme)
"Acceptable ADs platform" they launched in order to "help small websites" soon filled with advertiser whales who voted with their money. Suddenly a lot of ads were classified as... acceptable.
Wikipedia also keeps devoting significant screen space to asking for more donations from time to time even though they have more than enough money to keep the site running indefinitely. Should donations dry up with they reduce their (largely non-Wikipedia-related) expenses or will they just get more agressive in asking for moeney?
Wikipedia is probably in a strange problem where they have more than enough money (they do have a lot of staff though?) and really we would want them to keep going for hundreds of years, so I think it is good for them to keep an enormous runway. We can't trust governments to fund it, as it may not say nice things about those governments and they may want to change that. And by they I mean the USA which would probably end up being the biggest donor and thus get veto powers.
> I don't want the administrative workload coming with donations.
It's absolutely shameful that over three decades into the internet age, we still don't have zero friction ways of accepting, sending and accounting for money on the internet.
Exactly. Sure you can set up and accept money quite easily using any number of methods. The problem then comes in of how you are legally classified with each governmental jurisdiction that each donation happens to fall under, and now you're in a mountain of registrations, reports, audits, licenses, and other red tape.
You make it sound so complicated but even 14 year old teenagers on TikTok can make it work -- everything from Venmo, Patreon, buy me a coffee type sites, Amazon wishlists. Unless you're pulling in crazy amounts of cash there's really no legal red tape for person to person gifts.
Sure they do, but it's not strictly legal. Everyone just kind of lets it slide. A gift is no longer a gift if something is expected in return (like Patreon exclusive perks) - it's a service and you can't provide a service as a regular person. Many of these creators should really be setting up companies or registering as self-employed (I'm not too familiar with the English terminology for this stuff) and then paying all the required taxes and other fees.
As soon as we're no longer talking about just teenagers on TikTok, but instead about everyone on the Web, regulators are going to want to make sure it's used legally. And we're not talking about one, but theoretically all the jurisdictions at once. Having an open standard for that sounds impossible to me and having a defacto standard corporate service (like if Google Pay became the "standard" for web payments) sounds worse than nothing.
Regardless of how you access it you just take what you've been paid and add it to 'other income' when filing your taxes.
If you're getting "big" donations, stripe or paypal will send you a k1 if you make > 20k. Otherwise there are not really any other administrative things to worry about.
And what if you’re not in the US? The author of uBlock is in Quebec (or so says their GitHub profile), and various jurisdictions might have different rules on donations.
For anybody who needs a FAQ about where the donation button is the absolute worst case difficulty for any jurisdiction is calling an accountant to have them do it for you.
The payment technology is less of an issue. Consumers been able to send small amounts of money all over the world for a decade or two. It’s more about the regulatory framework around taxes and income that make this difficult
There's still friction. Do you know how to do your taxes on international income, CGT, discounting transfer fees, etc? There are services which will do most of that for you, but that's still time to export/import the transactions, ~$50 to get the summary, some more time to deal with actually putting that info on your tax return.
Realistically that's probably 3h of work in a year, but I'd probably pay a bit of money not to have to do it.
I understand why gorhill doesn’t want to accept donations. I’ve seen him post on Hacker News every now and again so I would like to suggest that he encourage users of uBlock and uMatrix to make a donation to a favoured charity similar to how Bram Molenaar encourages Vim users to donate to the ICCF in Uganda¹. I usually make a few donation around this time of year to FOSS projects and other valuable services such as archive.org, Wikipedia, FSF, EFF, etc.
I agree. The second you take any donation, you can't use the excuse of "I'm doing this work for free. Leave me alone if you don't like it" because at that point you aren't doing it for free. While you don't necessarily "owe" donors anything, that won't really matter because in their eyes, you were paid to do work, and you didn't do it.
> The second you take any donation, you can't use the excuse of "I'm doing this work for free. Leave me alone if you don't like it" because at that point you aren't doing it for free.
No, I don't agree. Communicate clearly that donations are in no way payment for the work being / to be done, does not constitute any preferential treatment / service agreement, and you're good.
This setup works for me well, and I have no issues with people's expectations.
One way to think about this is that people should donate based on value that they've already gained from the project, not additional value that they expect in the future.
That said, for an active maintainer who is currently accepting donations (ESPECIALLY recurring donations), making a good-faith effort to deliver on requests from supporters (certainly bugs, and ideally features) is expected. Failure to make that effort doesn't mean you owe anyone anything, but it might mean you're a jerk.
> for an active maintainer who is currently accepting donations (ESPECIALLY recurring donations), making a good-faith effort to deliver on requests from supporters (certainly bugs, and ideally features) is expected
Even if the maintainer makes it clear and explicit that donations don't grant such expectations? If a donor feels entitled despite clarity from the maintainer, that's on the donor.
If you want to pay the maintainer to work on a feature you want, the proper course should be to just contact the maintainer and work something out, no?
That's fair, and to be clear I wasn't saying that's how it should be. I just know that a lot of people like to complain when they see "Project X got $N of donations" and feel like as a result they're entitled to "customer service"...at least in some of the drama of I've seen.
That said, the drama might be more outlier...I've never really had an open source project that's big enough for people to want to give me money for it, so I will totally admit I'm speaking out of ignorance.
Presumably the feeling of doing good in the world is reward enough for them, especially if they already have more than enough money to get by (as most devs in the west do).
When people donate to an open source software project, they probably aren't intending to donate to some other cause that the maintainer cares about. It would be at least slightly unethical to solicit donations for the former and spend them on the latter unless the donation page was exceptionally forthright about it.
There are other ways of supporting a project than via money. You can talk about it and recommend it to others. That can often be worth more than donations to an independent project that doesn't have much in terms of marketing capabilities.
It's kind of weird to work for free though, isn't it? Sure it's something we like doing, but I really see no reason to reject free money. For uBlock this free money would be a fairly large amount, I'm sure. Even if that'd require some legal setup, I assume those fees will be largely covered.
Money as the end-all-be-all is pretty new. I notice it a lot in American culture in particular.
People have dedicated their life to all sorts of endeavors in the past, and still do of course. Big religions are a prime source of people doing large amounts of work for no money.
It's quite odd to me to think that any activity i engage in should be to accumulate these tokens. Something i do stuff for the process itself. Sometimes to get a smile from people. Sometimes to see more beauty around me. Etc
Yeah but… money. You can’t pay rent with smiles. Accepting donations would probably mean having to work less at their main job. Or they could re-donate it.
There are people willing and able to pay, leaving those money on the table is pure waste.
You do. Make an effort to think of the many cases in life where people do things for each other without money. Parents will host you for free, shelters do it, woofing or being au-pair, etc.
Open-source can be run like a business, but it can just as well be run like a shelter, or language-enthusiasts club, and any other form of human social organization.
In the same way, people do ride-sharing for a fee, yet you can also put your thumb in the air and people will gladly share their ride for free.
Humanity has many facets to it. Money is just one of the ways people will organize around. There are many more. Yourself probably have time and places where you would do stuff for free. I know people who teach IT in school for free for instance, because they love the rewarding activity
> It's kind of weird to work for free though, isn't it?
Agree with the sibling. Trying to get compensated for everything you do - particularly hobbies - is what is considered weird in most of the world.
> For uBlock this free money would be a fairly large amount, I'm sure. Even if that'd require some legal setup, I assume those fees will be largely covered.
I think you're highly overestimating how much he'd get. I recall many years ago another developer stopped receiving donations and he posted in detail how much he would receive. It really wasn't that much, but while it may just have covered all the overhead fees, when you factor in the time spent on record keeping, etc, it was a net loss.
> Or they could re-donate it.
Consider this his way of trying to make things more efficient, and giving people the hint to donate elsewhere rather than him being the conduit to donate elsewhere :-)
> leaving those money on the table is pure waste.
So are so many aspects of our lives: For the majority of folks, eating at an average restaurant and paying tips is leaving money on the table - both literally and figuratively. If you look at the efficiency of how people use (and waste) money, you'll see almost everyone does it - including anyone who buys a car less than 6 years old.
I don't know much about the author, but say you have a job and 2+ kids. You are very likely in the "negative" when it comes to free time. You value time more than money, and only want money if it can buy you more time. In this case, it's really not clear whether the money he would get from donations would be worth the tax hassle alone. Also: Consider that many of us do our own taxes, so it's not a matter of "just throw this at my tax person".
>I want to be free to move onto something else if ever I get tired working on these projects
I absolutely get this feeling of not wanting to be trapped, nor should you ever feel like you have to work on it. You have already volunteered your time plenty.
uBlock origin is maybe one of the most critical extensions, maybe the most critical extension. If for some reason you don't want to maintain it, please let us know so somebody can take it over.
On any of the open-source projects I've been involved with that wasn't already funded somehow, I never experienced that anyone asked "Why don't you accept donations?" Would have been nice :)
There are so many people who are collecting donations and advancing all their projects according to their will. they don't even take suggestions seriously :D but I like your point of view.
