I don't want to infer motives because I don't know. I will say that I am among those who doesn't really believe this is simply a morality tale. There are several folks here, like yourself, who are basically saying, "yeah, I can understand the mentality of not wanting to do and ad-blocker because of the moral grey area" I can understand that as well.
What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days after launching the product. I don't think people here are questioning whether developers are willing to forego their own financial gain for their moral ease (the very existence of the FSF makes it clear that there is a willingness). It's simply a very sudden turn for someone who previously demonstrated no such compunction.
2 days is a short period of time, but the context over those days is massively different.
On Sept 16th, a few dozen beta testers may have been using Peace and giving Marco feedback. On Sept 18, Peace is the top ranked app in the app store, displacing MineCraft. MineCraft! Estimates are in the 12000-15000 downloads on the first day[1]. You look in your iTunes connect account and realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods. I can understand how that makes you consider the morality in ways you hadn't before.
Marco isn't against ads. He's said as much, and he runs ads himself. He's against oppressive, annoying, UX destroying ads. He wants to encourage tasteful ads. But within a day he himself had to write a story about how his own app would block ads from The Deck[2], which he has said is the type of advertising he finds tasteful and acceptable. Peace wouldn't effect change if it also impacted 'good' ads, and Marco said in that post he didn't want to be the arbitrator of what is a good and bad ad. At that point it was only a question of when he would pull it.
I don't believe he wrote an app hoping to have a small user base, so I don't believe that the success of the app was the problem. Without to mention that there are a number of ways to fix that, including finding a price point that makes it less interesting in order to reduces the installation base. But if the app was created in the first place, it was because the idea was to make everybody install it. It's a blackbox since we don't know the details but from the outside output I don't believe the blog post contains all the facts that influenced this choice.
Thinking you understand what a situation is going to be like ahead of time and seeing what that situation actually is like when it happens are 2 very different things.
The world is full of stories of people who attempt something and then get upset or disheartened or unhappy when it comes to pass. Why does everyone have to assume something nefarious here?
> I don't believe he wrote an app hoping to have a small user base, so I don't believe that the success of the app was the problem.
Absolutely agreed. All else aside, I don't really believe someone goes through the trouble of building, launching and promoting an iOS application on the app store (with all its hurdles) with the thought, "Gee, I really hope it doesn't get too popular!"
I'm not Marco (nor have I ever talked to him) and I'm not trying to put myself into his head space. Moreover, I absolutely despise a conspiracy theory. I'm simply saying that the explanation he gave, true or not, does not make sense to me so I personally choose not to believe it. If I were Marco and reading my comment, my response would be, "Good for you; I honestly couldn't care less what you think."
Dunno, marco just seems like an entitled jerk who's constructed a maze of rationalization around ad blocking. If you don't like the ads a website shows, well, you should have found that out of the first visit. Great. Then don't visit again. Here's his rationalization:
Publishers won’t solve this problem: they cannot consistently enforce
standards of decency and security on the ad networks that they embed in
their sites. Just as browsers added pop-up blockers to protect us from that
abusive annoyance, new browser-level countermeasures are needed to protect
us from today’s web abuses.
And we shouldn’t feel guilty about this. The “implied contract” theory that
we’ve agreed to view ads in exchange for free content is void because we
can’t review the terms first — as soon as we follow a link, our browsers
load, execute, transfer, and track everything embedded by the publisher. Our
data, battery life, time, and privacy are taken by a blank check with no
recourse. It’s like ordering from a restaurant menu with no prices, then
being forced to pay whatever the restaurant demands at the end of the meal. [1]
To use his dumb analogy, it's going to the same restaurant over and over and whining about the prices. If you don't like the prices, stop going.
Continuing to visit while blocking ads is no different than downloading movies or apps for free because you can. It's fine when a handful of people do it; just like music sharing wasn't a huge problem until Napster. When every ios user starts totally blocking ads, it's not longer ignorable. There's no human right to read the nytimes.
what part of his "maze of rationalization around ad blocking" has he rescinded? None.
I still believe that ad blockers are necessary today, and I still think
Ghostery is the best one, but I’ve learned over the last few crazy days that
I don’t feel good making one and being the arbiter of what’s blocked. [1]
He doesn't want to be the author of the ad-blocking software, but he continues to use it. :rolleyes: He wants to dodge personal responsibility while continuing to engage in and advocate for the behavior he's now acknowledged is harmful. ie he's an entitled jerk.
Note ad blocking also disabled ads on marco.org and daringfireball.net, though; I'm sure that was unrelated to his decision.
ps -- he hasn't refunded his users. He's indicated how they can get a refund which isn't the same thing at all. Sincere regret might be easier to believe if he got rid of the tens of thousands of dollars he earned from this.
> realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods
Because someone giving me 100k for an app which wrote, to use it for the exact purpose I made it for is certainly /the/ reason I would change my mind about making it...
> and subject me to a torrent of unpleasantness. But that’ll end soon enough, and that’s better than how I’d feel if I kept going.
What he doesn't say is that he is obviously already getting what amounts to a "torrent of unpleasantness", from people which are more like colleagues than customers. Of course, no one wants to admit to kowtowing, so there is no mention of it, but as we can see, he cares about this sort of thing, so it was obviously a significant factor.
So you're saying your idea of what's moral is different. The "what he doesn't say" and "cares about this sort of thing" is completely unfounded and callous. Not exactly useful.
Can you or anyone else tell me if The Deck ads still track and employ targeting. If they do, then personally I'd consider them still invasive and worth blocking. If not, then I see his point.
Thank you. I should have clicked the link before posting. I'd agree that a better option would have been to have an ad network whitelist option to reward those who strive for improving UX. Tough spot to be in.
Some people "don't know what they think until they run it through their mouths." Some test reality by trying a thing, seeing how it feels, deciding what to do once they know how it feels.
For people who have done things the rest of the world said could not be done, this is the only feedback mechanism that makes sense. (Shrug)
I don't get this. "the rest of the world said could not be done" - adblocking? I'm not sure what you're implying - the only way he had to know was to try because no-one thought it could be done?
Anyone who has built a big business or has otherwise accomplished anything significant will have run into a great many naysayers who said it could not be done. If you get anywhere in life, you eventually learn to stop listening to the naysayers and find ways to test reality for yourself.
This is likely why people like Steve Jobs have such negative reputations: They learned what their limits were by hitting a metaphorical wall, because it was the only realistic way to learn their actual limits. If you are very intelligent or competent, it will be your routine experience that you can do a great many things that people around you claim "cannot be done." After a while, you just stop listening to the counsel of the great masses of people who try to tell you to not try, who try to tell you that you will regret it.
It is a general observation about the behavior of very accomplished people. Presumably, someone who has fuck you money that he earned himself (as others here on HN are saying he has) falls in that category.
In the past, being famous usually required a lot of effort and (usually) money. Many people that could have been famous but didn't spend the time/money to make it happen were often discovered by the larger public only after their death. The end game of this property are things like the modern manufactured artist, where fame is achieved because that was the business plan.
An important consequence of this "traditional" type of fame is that someone who wants to leave and get their old life back can generally stop participating. Without the time/money investment the public moves on. "Traditional" fame is a job you can walk away from.
This changed with the internet, where people can become famous by accident. A tweet or blog post can suddenly get millions of views, or something you made can suddenly become the thing that everybody is trying to get a copy of. It's obvious that this is a well-known concept because we have entire industries working to try to make their product "go viral".
This "unexpected" type of fame has a serious problem: it's permanent. It is hard or impossible to simply "walk away' from something when that would mean walking away from your normal life.
When the tsunami of unexpected fame suddenly happens to someone, it is perfectly rational for someone to try to escape the situation before it becomes permanent. The only problem is it may be too late. Also, we're not helping: the fact that this thread on HN even exists is only making this product (and the drama surrounding it) even more famous.
Robin Hood the thing. Give exactly 100% of the money to starving children. Literally. Personally, not through some charity. Literally go to a 3rd-world nation (on your own money, don't dare touch money collected through the app), find parents of starving children, and give them each a $100 bill.
Start a trend. Start that trend. Be that person. Not just the person who had a hit iOS app. Be the person who eliminates hunger by setting a simple, obvious, example. Does that feel good? Also keep our app.
He might have had the quite reasonable expectation that this would end up like desktop adblockers; that is, something which the average person doesn't even know exists. It ending up on the front of the App Store, though, is showing it to a lot of people who'd never previously have considered an ad blocker. That's more pressure.
Of course, someone else will be there instead, but I can see the desire not to be the person who causes an abrupt shift in how content monetisation happens on mobile.
To be honest, I was surprised when he released it; from his podcast my impression was that was in the "pro Adblock, but cautious" camp. He was possibly a bit naive about how big it'd get.
My takeaway was that he doesn't want to be in the crossfire in the ads war. I can imagine that being very stressful and unpleasant with lots of hate mail etc. Especially if you compare it to an app like Overcast that brings joy to everyone using it.
Or worse, became in pawn in the Ad Wars between Google, Apple, and Facebook.
Let's face it, AdBlock on the Web only benefit closed network like Facebook, which also has plenty of PII. If the Web dies as as an Ad platform (because of AdBlockers), guess where the advertisers can go?
>What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days after launching the product.
Again, I think the best answer is simply the one he gave:
>"Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate"
He didn't anticipate it. In other words, he learned something about himself.
Hopefully that happens all the time to all of us, and hopefully we have the courage to do what we consider the most conscionable thing, even if we know it will may unpopular.
What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days after launching the product. I don't think people here are questioning whether developers are willing to forego their own financial gain for their moral ease (the very existence of the FSF makes it clear that there is a willingness). It's simply a very sudden turn for someone who previously demonstrated no such compunction.