No good deed goes unpunished
Advertising is simply part of modern culture. It’s easy to see on the Internet, even if you (like myself) install ad-blocking plugins and run filters on your email. And if you pick up a magazine these days, half the pages are filled with it. And even the articles trend anymore to being mere vehicles for advertisement, themselves. Everything has a price-tag, and anymore, we have become not consumers but indeed, another product to be sold. Our very eyeballs and, by extension, those micro-seconds of consciousness we spend on either looking at or tuning out this barrage have become a commodity.
I run a wiki, which is predicated on the notion of open access to allow anyone to edit the content therein. Idealism in its extreme, of course, in our era of consciousness-predators. Even having installed software that blocks automated advertisement insertion, I must actively combat the onslaught of people (and, yes, they are humans, though they use software) seeking to pervert my tool for their own greedy purposes. Well, my software has been successfully breached again. I’m considering shutting down the wiki, because it’s easier to give up and not give these people a venue for their predation than to keep upgrading, re-installing, changing.
Supporting advertising as a model of running an Internet site perpetuates this machine. If you want to run a site, throw up a paywall if you want money from people. Or put up a micro-payment donation system. Otherwise, the human cost cannot be calculated.
Man, fuck greed, and anything that enables it. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Many people don’t realize that ‘paid for by advertising’ is not the same as ‘free’. Kickstarter is a beautiful thing, though.
Indeed, Kickstarter, Indygogo, etc. are exactly the Right Way to do that sort of thing.