Advertisements by commercial service/product vendors

Paid adverts are a conflict of interest

Any advertising in exchange for money moves the incentives from doing what's best for the communities to doing what's best for making money. Initially this can mean compromises such as spending less time on improvements needed by the communities. Over time this conflict can grow until an organisation is actively working against its communities.

Even community voted ads cause problems

If it were decided to show adverts on a Codidact community, there may be an attempt to mitigate the conflict of interest by requiring that each proposed advert be voted on by that specific community. This way no adverts will show except on communities that want them, and only those adverts that the community has approved will be shown.

This might at first exclude the various kinds of adverts a community might object to, but anyone paying for adverts would have a strong incentive to influence the voting, in various ways:

• Creating multiple sockpuppet accounts to allow an individual person to vote multiple times.
• Paying people to create accounts in order to vote.
• Paying existing users to vote.

I would expect this to create extra work both for Codidact staff behind the scenes, and for the members of each community having discussions on Meta about specific adverts, taking time and effort away from other potential discussions of improvements.

I would much prefer to see no adverts of any kind. I believe it is possible for an open source project to thrive without advertising.

posted 4 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

trichoplax‭

304 119 1068 421

Why?

The only costs are those associated with servers, URLs etc. Perhaps some rare dev tool costs or travel expenses. There is no paid staff.

So far, all of that has been funded by donations and while that remains a feasible way to fund the site, there is no reason to change it. If there ever becomes a need to hire staff full time and donations turn insufficient to run the site, then we could look for alternative ways to make income.

I don't think we should be too dogmatic about ads though. There's a danger with having too high principles and sitting in some ivory tower like Wikipedia ended up. It's now a "beggar-funded" site where all income comes from organized begging through massively invasive beggar spam, which is ten times more distracting than most kinds of ads. That's an excellent way to kill a site or make people hate it.

posted 4 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Lundin‭

37 62 473 57

I was a frequent puzzle contributor at Somewhere Else where I posted over 300 puzzles but I started posting puzzles here on Codidact because of the ads at Somewhere Else.

I don’t want ads here.

posted 4 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

will.octagon.gibson‭

4 1 16 4

I wouldn't be opposed to ads as long as:

1. They aren't in the way of content. Right now there is a column at right that is useless anyway. Allowing one or maybe two ads at the top of that column wouldn't be intrusive.
2. The ads must be vetted for relevance to the particular community they are displayed in. No ads would be allowed on generic Codidact pages. The mechanism for vetting is to be determined.
3. Absolutely NO FLASHING OR ANIMATIONS.
4. Ads are clearly labeled as "paid advertising".
5. The ad images live on Codidact servers. They are called up from a pool based on chance which could be weighted by a price scale. In other words, more expensive ads could be shown more often.
6. Embedded links to click on for more information are OK, as long as these go to expected and relevant places. Checking this would be part of the vetting process.

If done right, ads could actually be useful. In the context of the Electrical Engineering site, I would welcome respected manufacturers announcing new parts, for example. I would expect the company name to be clickable to go to the home page on their web site, and specific products to be clickable to go to the product page. A link directly to the datasheet would be useful, perhaps even required for that type of ad.

A comment to another answer:

could you say more about the kinds of ads you envision, as compared to community-curated promotions? For example, if the community itself could create things to go into the right column to highlight products, services, or whatever, would that meet the need you're seeing? Or is the whole point that you want (certain) outside sources to be able to advertise things that members of your community might not already know about (and thus not be able to promote as I described)?

A good example of something I would find useful is reputable manufacturers announcing new products that are relevant to the site topic and provide some advantage over existing products.

I'll use the Electrical Engineering site as an example. A significant part of designing a circuit is selecting critical components. There are way too many components out there for anyone to know more than a small fraction. Manufacturers and distributors have "part selectors" on their web site where you can search by some parameters. That's what most EEs do, in addition to having converged on their own go-to set of "jelly bean" parts for common usages. But, it's still important to have at least a rough idea of what's out there and possible.

There are literally millions of parts. In my own lab, I have 41 (I just counted) 64-drawer small parts cabinets mounted on a wall. That's 2,624 separate drawers. They aren't all used, but it is correct to say that I have "thousands" of different parts in stock, and that's just me.

If Microchip brings out a new 16 bit controller with floating point hardware, I want to know about it. Same with a new opamp from TI that has FET inputs with only 200 µV offset and 10 MHz gain⋅bandwith, a new inductor from CoilCraft that has a lower profile or less DC resistance in a smaller package or lower price than before, etc.

If I'm not interested in a new connector from Molex or Phoenix Contact for example, I wouldn't get upset at the ad as long as it followed the rules above and it provided genuine un-hyped info about something new, even if it's not the type of product I envision ever using or care about.

Ads are information, and information can be useful. Most ads are annoying and make you want to avoid the host site because they:

• Interrupt what you are really trying to get on with. Examples are TV commercials or "the video will play after this ad".
• Try to distract your attention, like flashing or with animations when you're trying to read an article.
• Aren't relevant. I'm not going to buy a car in the next year and don't have a baby that needs diapers.
• Are in your face, like web sites where the real content is squished because so much room is devoted to ads.
• Are disguised as neutral content or otherwise trying to be sneaky in getting you to pursue them for the wrong reasons. Major internet search engines are more and more guilty of this. You have to look very closely to tell the ads from genuine search results.
• Trying to get you to buy something on emotional grounds instead of reasons useful to you. "We think you're so dumb that you'll buy our product because we make it look cool." Most car ads are guilty of this.
• Too much hype with too little real content.

We are all conditioned to hate ads because of the above, but most of these problems can be eliminated or mitigated when you own the platform and set high standards. When you do that, it actually makes the ads more valuable to responsible advertisers because they won't be competing with other ads that are all hype and flash and that make users leave the site or tune out all ads.

Ads aren't inherently bad or annoying, even if the vast majority are. When you don't allow all the crap, ads can have genuine useful information content that provide a service to users and allow the site to continue operating.

posted 4 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

4mo ago

Olin Lathrop‭

52 154 432 140