Well, hey. So have yours gone unwarned.Aardvaarkman said:
Also, I don't think it's that hard to imagine that a mod can comment and reply at the same time.
Jimquisition: The Adblock Episode
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Also, I don't think it's that hard to imagine that a mod can comment and reply at the same time.
It certainly doesn't come across that way, especially when the posts from that person have been anything but jokey and casual, and more on the spectrum of "willing to use the small amount of power I've been given to impose my will."lacktheknack said:
Since you started talking about how police aren't threatening.lacktheknack said:
Oh, I have been in the real world. I've been in completely peaceful protests, where the protesters are charged with police in riot gear, and sprayed with tear gas. When they posed absolutely no threat. I've seen them drag homeless people away for the crime of being homeless.lacktheknack said:
You said police are NEVER threatening. That means it can never have happened even once.
And yet, police assaults happen regularly. Like every day. How is that not regular?lacktheknack said:
Actually, they get away with more than most of us ever will. Police are often pardoned for some seriously sick behaviour.lacktheknack said:
Why? For speaking the truth?lacktheknack said:
This:Aardvaarkman said:
What the hell? Policemen are frequently threatening. Policemen regularly assault people without cause and abuse their power.
Yes. That's totally what policemen do.
How fucking DARE you say that about my family?
it's funny because you think it's truth and not gleaned entirely from sources that only portray bad news. It's funny, because you think highly publicized things are common. it's funny because you think that because it happens a few times, it must happen constantly.Aardvaarkman said:
What you've said is not the truth, no matter how much you desperately want it to be.
How is that a personal attack? Firstly, it wasn't directed at you. Secondly, it's a simple statement of fact. Abuse by police happens all the time.lacktheknack said:
Thirdly, "threatening" doesn't just mean abuses of power. Heck, police are trained to appear threatening as a means of extending power.
Have you not noticed how police clothing has gotten more militaristic over the years? It's turned sharply away from a "dress uniform" style to "SWAT team" style, especially since the supposed "war on terror" (more like war on civil liberties).
Well, when you swing a bucket of feces freely, you're going to hit someone with it.Aardvaarkman said:
Refer to my previous post for the abuse and threatening parts.
Also, no. The police here are still in dress uniform with vest. You're talking about American police, presumably, who I can't comment on. Neither of us can, since we're in Canada and Australia.
Why should I have had to? I've seen his/her posts in this thread. They weren't exactly comforting and lacking in hostility.lacktheknack said:
And since when did that encompass the entirely of police? And when the hell does that ever happen anyway? Police usually don't just stand around on corners being watchful. If there's a policeman doing that, it's probably for some other reason.lacktheknack said:
Again, not true. A policeman relaxing while his partners beat the shit out of someone is quite threatening.lacktheknack said:
You'd be wrong. It's more often the case that the riot cops escalate the situation. Riot police usually aren;t called in to control a pre-existing riot, but to create one.lacktheknack said:
You say it yourself "edging towards rioting" - not actually rioting. And you have to remember that the media is usually extremely biased in these cases. I've seen it first-hand. People who are absolutely peaceful, who get attacked by police, and then it's reported in the media as being the protestor's fault for being violent.
That you know of. You do know that most of this stuff never gets officially written ump right? And that's just your city. How many cities are there in the world?lacktheknack said:
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Does the Rodney King case not count because it was publicised? It's curious that you'd add that clause.lacktheknack said:
But it does happen constantly. I know it from personal experience. Usually when a police officer assaults someone, it turns into a charge of the victim assaulting the police. That would be a good proxy for how often it happens - every time you see someone charged for assaulting the police, it's pretty safe to assume that it was the other way around.lacktheknack said:
As someone with ties to the police, I can safely say that you horribly underestimate just how seriously the police force takes police brutality. Your proxy is bullshit.Aardvaarkman said:
I have no interest in continuing this. Your rhetoric changes on the drop of a hat, you stop acknowledging any points I make when you have no rebuttal, and you have no respect for what's obviously a hot-button issue for me, instead choosing to relentlessly slam it, say stuff you blatantly pulled from your hat and completely derail the original conversation. I'm out.
I leave you with this: There's not even a snowball's chance in Hell that your suggestions on how moderation should work will be considered if this is how you present it.
It wasn't me who brought up the police analogy, it was TpoazFusion.lacktheknack said:
Nope. I don;t give a crap about "winning." What the hell would I win? I'm just here to have a discussion.lacktheknack said:
Your ties to the police don't help your credibility or impartiality on this matter.lacktheknack said:
So, it can be a hot-button issue for you as someone with "ties to the police" but not for me, who has been the victim of police assault? Do you have any respect for that?lacktheknack said:
My apologies. I did not intend to derail the situation or insult you, I was just speaking my mind.
The off-topic tangents are really unfortunate. And no, my ideas are very unlikely to become a reality.lacktheknack said:
But consider this: the conversation probably would have stayed firmly on the topic of ad blocking if it wasn't for the intervention of some completely one-sided moderators.
The thread started off as one of the most remarkably civil threads in Jimquisition history until the mods showed up. Then it got even worse after a couple of others showed up and started accusing people of stealing because of different opinions.
Should I assume this is you admitting that you've been reporting every post you are fighting a losing argument in?Aardvaarkman said:
Please. I personally don't care about winning any argument on the internet.
Depends. If you have Motorola hardware, they indeedly do prevent fast-forwading on VOD. Every program on VOD is "Please note, that fast forward is disabled for this program", I'll also note the commercials on VOD are shorter. Likewise if I go directly to the premium channels websites and watch VOD directly, they won't let me skip the commercials sometimes.Zachary Amaranth said:
https://www.facebook.com/twc/posts/231604266941493
http://www.deadline.com/2013/06/disney-exec-praises-ad-supported-vod-with-fast-forward-disabled-cable-show/
The cable-company owned PVR can be made to prevent fast forwarding as well, but that's why third-party models exist that hook up to the firewire port. What you're going to see is more VOD-only or VOD-exclusive programming. VOD is run through the same headend as PPV is, just VOD will only let you watch what you already subscribe to (for no additional cost,) while PPV will let you watch anything, once, for a cost. Usually the 5C is set to copy-never for VOD and PPV. So your PVR can't record it.
And to repeat, Cable companies are calling their VOD services "PVR" experiences, and some providers (particularly satellite) may do Push-VOD that actually schedules the show to be downloaded to all devices, regardless if you watch it or not.
As for how this comes back to the ad blocking issue, you can't block it. Not in the US anyway (Europe's DVB standard is a bit more hackable.)
If you hit your audience with invasive, annoying, and occasionally even harmful ads, you are harming the audience's ability to enjoy the show. At that point, you begin shedding viewers in direct proportion to their personal tolerance levels.
Any entertainment venue which relies on ads therefore faces a balancing act: how to bring in the maximum amount of revenue while losing the minimum amount of audience. This should be, and is, obvious, regardless of how many tangents and distractions may abound along the way.
Television survived and thrived for decades on advertising revenues because it understood that ads needed to entertain --- NOT ANNOY. The more obnoxious one's ads are, the more likely they are to drive one's audience to go do something else.
This is not changed by complaining about how "unfair" people are when they say the ads are invasive, annoying, and occasionally even harmful. Such concerns do not disappear merely because you dismiss or ignore them.
Two extremes exist here. At one end, everybody gets everything for free, the creators get nothing, and the entertainment dies as soon as its production becomes too cumbersome to maintain out of sheer love. At the other, you've implemented advertising methods so noisome that your only real viewers are those with pre-paid no-advertising subscriptions. The problem here is that The Escapist is now edging towards the latter extreme.
There will always be those who feel so self-entitled that they will AdBlock anything and everything merely because they can. They are not your paying customers.
These are NOT to be confused with those who raise concerns with substance behind them. Again, it doesn't matter if you think you can cobble together a rationale to dismiss the substance; it's still there. These people ARE your paying audience, because they WILL put up with advertising to a point.
So what call does The Escapist really have to make?
It boils down to what percentage of their paying customers they are willing to drive away, in exchange for (presumably) more-profitable forms of advertising. There is a point of equilibrium, beyond which it's simply a game of diminishing returns.
That's all there is to it.
Any entertainment venue which relies on ads therefore faces a balancing act: how to bring in the maximum amount of revenue while losing the minimum amount of audience. This should be, and is, obvious, regardless of how many tangents and distractions may abound along the way.
Television survived and thrived for decades on advertising revenues because it understood that ads needed to entertain --- NOT ANNOY. The more obnoxious one's ads are, the more likely they are to drive one's audience to go do something else.
This is not changed by complaining about how "unfair" people are when they say the ads are invasive, annoying, and occasionally even harmful. Such concerns do not disappear merely because you dismiss or ignore them.
Two extremes exist here. At one end, everybody gets everything for free, the creators get nothing, and the entertainment dies as soon as its production becomes too cumbersome to maintain out of sheer love. At the other, you've implemented advertising methods so noisome that your only real viewers are those with pre-paid no-advertising subscriptions. The problem here is that The Escapist is now edging towards the latter extreme.
There will always be those who feel so self-entitled that they will AdBlock anything and everything merely because they can. They are not your paying customers.
These are NOT to be confused with those who raise concerns with substance behind them. Again, it doesn't matter if you think you can cobble together a rationale to dismiss the substance; it's still there. These people ARE your paying audience, because they WILL put up with advertising to a point.
So what call does The Escapist really have to make?
It boils down to what percentage of their paying customers they are willing to drive away, in exchange for (presumably) more-profitable forms of advertising. There is a point of equilibrium, beyond which it's simply a game of diminishing returns.
That's all there is to it.
Well yes, ad blockers are perpetuating a selfish behavior at heart, so it's no surprise they act petulantly at first when punished for it. However, you'd have to be truly stubborn to waste your time like that over the long term.Zachary Amaranth said:
In most cases, people will rage audibly while hypocritically caving when no one can see them.
They would have to edit the video and replace it with one without it when the campaign ends since the use rights expire, which is more effort. But you're right, Jim's videos are perfect places to throw product placement in as opposed to arbitrary baked-into-the-video adverting you can't actually click on. Jim could just as easily go "here's the website for the current thingy I'm holding in my right hand *spell it out*, and for the thingamajig in my left hand *spell it out*"ultreos2 said:
Podcast people do it. And you can still skip over it. You can't usually skip the prerolls because the player doesn't let you. But you don't always see the prerolls either (go the earliest videos on Zero Punctuation, the only ad on it is at the end for the Subscription service, which is a separate video.)
This was already addressed by a staff member, a number of pages back.ultreos2 said:
If they embed ads directly into their videos here, they would have no way of removing them when serving the videos to people who've paid for an ad-free premium membership.
They would have to store TWO copies of every video; one with ads and one without, effectively doubling the amount of server space required to host them.
I have a somewhat limited understanding of how the advertisement systems work, but to my knowledge, that isn't the only issue with serving advertisements. As I understand it, advertisers don't trust websites self-reported numbers for unique pageviews and total viewership. Most companies who serve ads do so through their own backend, which includes trackers that pay attention to viewership numbers on their own. Advertising companies do this so they know they're getting "accurate" (or at least information they trust) information on the amount of advertisements served.IceForce said:
There are other issues, as well, but I'm not as aware of those details, so I don't really feel comfortable responding on that topic. Kross has made some excellent points in several posts. I encourage reading this one [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/6.843934.20781551], despite its length. As well, this one [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/6.843934.20782065] and this one [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/6.843934.20783775].
For most purposes, advertising and budgeting are both topics with a pretty amazing number of moving parts. That's what makes threads like these so difficult, how do you take what on the face sounds like a very good idea, and outright deny people because it just doesn't work out that way in practice? Part of why discussions like this are so difficult for everyone involved.
In this case, that's not completely accurate. Websites can have relatively few lines of code to verify ad blocking, compared to a video content, which is literally data. It would effectively be two videos, one with ad files literally part of the video (increasing the file size) and one without. This would be two video files, with two respective sizes, both of which would need to be hosted on and served by the servers. Short of compression, there's not a lot that will change the fact that video files have a definitive size. There's also tracking issues that way, referenced in this post [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/6.843934.20782110], among others I'm unaware of.ultreos2 said:
That's not to say these ideas are definitively impossible, but in this instance, probably unrealistic. The Escapist is a relatively small team, and redefining a lot of code all at once isn't possible overnight. Especially with other issues that need to be addressed in practice as well. I don't doubt many websites are experimenting with this and slowly moving toward new systems. But until someone manages to address all of the problems at once, in a financially viable way for most companies, the current system is used so commonly because of its ability to fund sites like this one.
Just my thoughts, can't speak for its 100% accuracy.
Oookay, I'm going to cut off this conversation with you right here, because you clearly have no idea about the technology of which you speak, and I can't be bothered explaining it to you.ultreos2 said:
See NewClassic's post on the previous page, if you're really actually interested in this, and not just here to clutch at straws.
... Am I the only one that doesn't get all of the malware ads everyone keeps saying they get?
Maybe it's because I'm that one dude that likes to run MalwareBytes every other day and Avasts, Malwares, and Spybot: Search and Destroy's the computer weekly, but I've really never had an issue with ads breaking the computer.
As for annoying ads, again, I must be blessed or something, since I don't subscribe to the Escapist and the ads I do deal with are, for the most part, pretty good. There WAS this one really annoying about craft somethings or something or other that always kept expanding into the reply box in comments that pissed me off, but it was a really small complaint compared to everything. I never run adblock because I honestly don't feel that the ads are annoying enough to warrant its use in any capacity, really. :/
Maybe it's because I'm that one dude that likes to run MalwareBytes every other day and Avasts, Malwares, and Spybot: Search and Destroy's the computer weekly, but I've really never had an issue with ads breaking the computer.
As for annoying ads, again, I must be blessed or something, since I don't subscribe to the Escapist and the ads I do deal with are, for the most part, pretty good. There WAS this one really annoying about craft somethings or something or other that always kept expanding into the reply box in comments that pissed me off, but it was a really small complaint compared to everything. I never run adblock because I honestly don't feel that the ads are annoying enough to warrant its use in any capacity, really. :/