> Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.
Be very cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there's often no remaining options if you lose adsense.
The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently.
Maybe it's time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. But we're the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.
Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There's a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it's a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can't remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO'd that I can't find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that's just not possible?
> I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games.
I mean, many of the people on this website are the people who work for and enable these very companies in their injustice. The first step is to accept that, if you work for one of these companies, you are the injustice. "But I only work there, I don't make decisions!" people will claim; yet, at the end of the day, they are not only directly enabling these injustices but are very directly benefiting from them! We need to stop talking about these big tech companies as if they are abstract all-powerful gods acting from afar... somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system.
At the very least, if you have any friends who work for these companies, and if they aren't actively working from within to make something better--or like... don't have some pretty epic sob story about how they can't get another job and really really need the money for some reason (I'm going to leave this exact line up to the reader, as it is frankly negligible: the vast majority of the people who work at these big tech companies are not hurting for the money and are often part of a whole host of other problems in localized inequality)--it should be made clear to them that you are not OK with their moral tradeoffs.
>somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system
They built it because someone in Product or AdTech dreamt it up, sold it to some VP or directory, and got some project + product managers to run with it. That's like blaming irresponsible mining practices on the miners and not the people who are actually deciding to mine in the first place, or even where exactly to mine. Even in those cases, if you try to take some ethical high-road that doesn't maximize profits or serve some VP's ego, you'll likely find yourself relieved of your responsibilities in short order.
Chain of command, but also investor pressure to do everything even remotely legal to maximize profits is more to blame. If devs push back, they get replaced with devs who don't. The money is too lucrative and there are too many qualified people to really have much power to "do the right thing" in most big corps. Sure, you can voice concerns and try to change things, but if the decision is between "do a thing users will hate but will make the company 2% more per year" vs "don't do this thing and hope people will like us more for it"...yeah, they're gonna find someone to get it done.
Chain of command is a weird argument. If you don’t believe in war, then don’t work for a defense contractor. Engineers are a super-powerful enabling force.
In my most recent startup we had many hard days, but I would often say “hey, at least we aren’t designing tactical nukes, we’re helping people get jobs”
Engineers can and should take responsibility for what they work on.
Yes, evil power hungry CEO-types (I’m an eng turned CEO) will work hard and possibly succeed anyway, but that doesn’t mean engineers are absolved of responsibility.
Your proposal seems to me to put socio-economic problems on the back of individuals. Imagine what they would have to do. For every line of code they would have you predict all the socio-economic consequences. I rather think such problems should be solved politically.
At the end of the day we need to pay our bills, take care of our kids, and have something on the side for retirement.
If I don’t implement this system, someone else with less foresight or less alternatives will.
I agree with you for clearly evil stuff. But the system we’re talking about seems in a grey zone.
> For every line of code they would have you predict all the socio-economic consequences
This is like saying for every step you take, you would have to predict if it would kill you or not. This is not how humans generally function. You make simplifying assumptions, such as thinking, "If I go for a walk at night in the jungle, would that kill me or not?" and then take action based on the overall planned trip.
The same logic applies to shon's argument: if you write code for a tactical nuke manufacturer, would that contribute to harm in the world? You can then decide whether to work at that company or not, rather than analyzing if the "int count = 0" you just wrote brings the company closer to its (likely) destructive goals.
OK, so I actually happen to be an elected government official, and I additionally have spent a lot of my time working on attempts at getting legislative relief from DRM. And, you know what kind of sucks? At the end of the day, democracies reduce back down to personal responsibility, as you rely on people to vote, lobby, and even donate.
So like, here's the question: if we are going to give the people we know at Google a pass for their injustice because "don't hate the player, hate the game"... are we also going to give them a pass when they don't get involved in the attempt to get the laws changed against Google?
Most of the people I've known who work for Google seem to like Google, in no small part because of all of those benefits they receive due to all of the injustices they are enabling. Even if they feel a bit bad about what Google is doing, they still refuse to get involved because they claim it will get them in trouble at work... which is just the same problem, just shifted around a bit.
At the end of the day, all we have is "personal responsibility": if you keep shifting the blame for the things that happen in the world to the system and keep waiting for other people to come up with a solution, you've done nothing but become a demonstration for the tragedy of the commons.
Capitalism demands that companies do things that aren't good for consumers in order to maximize profits. Through the lens of game theory, a lot more corporate behavior makes a lot more sense. Until regulation makes it more expensive for a company to do user-hostile things than not, they'll keep making those decisions as rational actors. Developers are a fungible commodity. I'm not saying that change never comes from developers, just that when it does, I've found that it was because it was wrapped in a pitch of how to do something another way to make even MORE profit. So long as a thing is legal, or legal enough (risk of getting caught * negotiated penalty amount vs potential profit), what motivation would they have to not do it?
Alternatively, if you allow a legislative environment where bad behavior is rewarded, then—shocker!—bad behavior will be common.
Most people and companies engaging in bad behavior aren't doing it because they're evil, they're doing it because they don't care about good/evil as much as they care about money. If you just change the rules for how to make money (and not end up in jail), they will change their behavior in an instant.
Changing laws may be difficult, but your proposed solution involves changing the brains of a large number of people. Harder, not easier.
If legislation helps the big players so much, why do they spend so much lobbying against certain legislation? Why do big time CEOs complain about regulation so much, if it's such a boon?
The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren't a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There's no reason PayPal can't support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before.
Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1].
tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model.
The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on.
Consumers do not want a micropayment system built on the same idea of "shopping cart" where you have to click 100 times and enter a bunch of info to may a payment for 30 cents..
That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money.
The systemic issues finance systems prevents anyway from making a viable micropayment system
> That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money.
What on earth gives you the idea their systems are "terrible." They seem to be quite capable and do an excellent job of all the world's commerce. In Europe card networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, as required by regulation, so it's clearly not an efficiency thing. Heck an ACH payment costs 1/3 of a cent in volume, and that's going to instant/real-time next year with FedNow. It's been that way for 10 years in the UK, EU, AU with Faster Payments, SEPA and NPP respectively.
However my point is that you just need a stored balance wallet, like Cash App, Venmo or PayPal, and we've had at least one of those for decades.
Literally all a micropayment is, is increment(A) and decrement(B).
There's never been a technical reason that isn't possible with pretty much any dollar amount.
Do you have any reason to believe this is the case? I've seen a pile of dead bodies in the startup space over decades trying to do exactly this and nobody wants it. But every cycle people seem to convince themselves that there are no bodies, and Visa can't process payments, etc etc, and they give it a go. Only to end up in the graveyard with everyone else.
What is it that all these failed startups missed? I'd love to know because intellectually I want micropayments too. I just don't think it's actually something people really want IRL.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the regulatory environment. If you're the payment processor who accepts Visa/Mastercard, the customer can do chargebacks.
Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies.
To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.
Then you have the opposite problem - users who make a micropayment to watch your how-to video or whatever, and then two weeks later decide "nah, not gonna pay for that" and cancel it.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article. A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons. I don't HAVE to pay, but I like what they do enough to support them, and there are enough folks who feel similarly that they're able to sustain a decent living from it. Of course, this model only works for fairly successful creators, and greedy content companies would still run as many ads as possible even with paid subscriptions, e.g. Hulu / Comcast.
Every model, except paying individually for what you want, has big-picture problems that eventually surface.
Collective subscriptions are terrible. You don't a voice to ask for the things you like. Ads brought us private surveillance, as if we don't have enough with nosy governments.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article
Every time I hear about micropayments is about people trying to sell, not people trying to buy. And most often it's people trying to sell articles and quickly giving up and using ads.
A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons.
All of Substack blogs I've seen have a minimum paid option of something like $4/mo and it's all literature or opinion. I want something that's useful for me and needs works and yes, it's more likely to be found on YouTube.
Then you have the opposite problem. Customers are shy about giving out their bank routing info if large transactions aren't reversible. You don't want it withdrawing against the full balance of your bank account.
It has to be something that puts a reasonable amount of the risk on the user, rather than either none or an unlimited amount.
All of those services accept credit cards. Because there would otherwise be too many people unwilling to give up their bank routing number.
What you need is something that has irreversible transactions but also has a monthly total transfer limit and a "routing number" which is unique to the merchant and can be revoked for further transactions at any time. Ideally also something that allows people to make purchases on credit and earn "points" so it's competitive with credit cards.
That way people would actually be willing to use it, instead of having to give a startup with no reputation (or a company with the foul reputation the likes of PayPal) access to their entire bank balance.
> All of those services accept credit cards. Because there would otherwise be too many people unwilling to give up their bank routing number.
That's not actually true, they allow both ACH and debit cards.
But either way it's irrelevant, revocation risk can simply be offset with a fee.
The system doesn't suddenly stop working if you can only pass on 95% of the deposited amount. Or even 90%. Or 80%. If people want it, they'll use it anyways. The thing is they don't.
There are many possible reasons why something doesn't work. You surely know some technology that few people used until a little seemingly inocuous obstacle is removed.
Or maybe they didn't start with the right customers set. I mostly hear about microtransactions related to media, press, blogs... What if the application that can ignite their use is nothing of the sort?
>>What is it that all these failed startups missed?
The United States..... because I can assure you the rates you indicated are no where near what we have here. Card Present transactions are 1.5% + 0.15 cents per transactions Card not present it normally 2x that, ACH takes days and is not a fraction of a cent for the normal person, etc.
Doesn't really matter. You load up a wallet like you do today and have for decades then pay people from that. FedNow unequivocally solves this problem, and I guarantee you, it won't lead to micropayments because payments infrastructure is not now and has never been the blocker.
After all it's also not something people in countries with lower interchange or instant payments want.
I don't disagree with that at all. However, micropayments have come out before, many times, in many different iterations. It never got any traction. Again, I'd love to see a different model of monetizing the web too, I just don't have any reason to believe this is it.
With iPhones, nobody wanted it until they got it, but then they couldn't get enough of it - even though it started out only doing a fraction of what people wanted to use it for.
With micropayments they've had it several times and each time they said "no thank you please."
I 100% agree that customers have nothing against micro payments. I don't think the reason we don't typically encounter them is banks having bad systems.
In my mind, the issue is trust.
If I pay for something on the web, I need to trust I'll receive what was promised. How can I?
Micro payments have no room for refunds.
Without any system to refund bad purchases, fraudulent actors will run wild.
By their nature, small transfers don't produce large value, of their small value is offset by relatively larger chance of being scammed, what's the point?
No one is going to pay for a random website. Even if you visit that sites daily it's a hard sell.
With the inflation people don't have money laying around to spend on non-essential things.
You seem to be head through wall determined that it's just matter of accessibility. It's not.
Ads are ok. 1 company dominating the ad scene is what's wrong.
There should be an open alternative to Adsense. Without shady dealings. A public ad marketplace that keeps 1%, which should be enough to pay for the cost of running it and maintaining it. A non-profit.
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day.
Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
The collective value of your View/Clicks is far higher than $10 to advertizers per month. Most people wouldn't pay that amount.
This is just like insurance. Old people are subsidized by young. A rich person's View in the developed country is subsidizing Google just being available to a poor person elsewhere.
Don't assume that (a) people are ready to pay the true cost of running a site like Google without ads or (b) that it will even end up being a good thing for humanity overall.
We should just let the market sort it out. If people don’t want to pay as much as a website needs to be run, they should just not use the website, it can go out of business if necessary, and space can be opened up for a more efficient service provider.
I mean we’re basically allowing for an information asymmetry here, right? Which messes with supply and demand. Economists should be pissed.
The juiciest model is to make content that people go nuts for, like sports, then charge $100/mo for access to it, then run ads on top of that, i.e. what Comcast / Hulu do. You want the sports, so you have no choice but to pay what they demand and watch all the awful ads. They won't sell the rights to anyone because it's such a cash cow, and they know they don't even need to offer an ad-free experience, because the whole thing is just a gimmick to shove ads and marketing down throats in the first place.
Also why scammers in poor countries are so dedicated; they can make many times what they would from working a legit job just by scamming your grandparents over the internet. They might only need a few successes per month to make it worth the time.
Google actually used to offer this. I forget what it was called, but you put money in your account and it would big against other AdSense ads for display on websites. I think I remember being able to replace the ads with cat photos or whatever photos you wanted.
This would be really interesting in combination with some zero knowledge proofs, so you can allocate your subscription fees to sites without the payment processor (or the site) knowing who you in particular are patronizing.
zcash's shielded pool is probably the closest to a solution for that that exists today, and at the very least a bunch of the cryptography/math/overall model should be re-usable in a more traditional setup.
(I remain basically a crypto skeptic but zcash appear to at least be -attempting- something focused and interesting enough for me to continue to pay vague attention)
That's explored in section 5.1 of the Szabo paper.
tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier.
That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
So you need to give the site a reason not to charge the maximum.
Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access).
Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users.
But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
This sounds reminiscent of the Kindle Unlimited model, and author opinions as to its usefulness to them are ... varied.
Then again my brain keeps generating what it's convinced are fairer ways to do it ... and all of them so far also introduce sufficient additional friction for the user that they'd be dead on arrival.
Why would micropayments require users to make "a hundred purchasing decisions per day"?
One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
> One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
Sure, maybe. But different content producers are going to demand different pricing tiers. HBO isn't going to stream The Last of Us for the same per-second rate as a YouTube game streamer. Now if the "wallet software does the rest" and you have variable pricing, why wouldn't every content producer pick the top pricing tier? Without explicit decision making you lose the pricing signal.
Ditto The New York Times and BuzzFeed.
Suddenly your ecosystem fractures into a million pieces like Netflix did.
> The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
I suspect that's got a lot to do with Nick's motivations in publishing this, yes, but I think it's still correct regardless.
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day.
I wouldn't want to help hundreds of sites I visit every day to track me (with the payment system help). I have no doubts they will sell this info for some additional cents.
It's not fear of lack of privacy. It just feels not fair that if I pay them, they will instantly get more money from advertisers.
And I will just get more ads. Better targeted ones.
you do understand to do targeted ads they have to track you, and google is already buying all of your transactions from your banks, and credit card companies and matching that to your online profile
I would think it would work better in some kind of system like how I believe Youtube Premium works.
You pay $10/mth, and then that $10 gets split into $1 overhead and $9 allocated to the sites you tip/visit/use during the month.
So you visit 100 sites, each site gets $0.09, you visit 10 sites, each site gets $0.90 and if somehow you only visit 1 site, it gets $9 from you.
So you're not paying hundreds of dollars a month without realising, you don't need to go through payment processing for every site it's just invisible.
It could probably be tracked the same way ads are, so instead of an advertisement the section is removed (or the first ad block in the page is replaced with "thanks for the tip" and the rest are just removed).
So technically you're not paying the site, you're paying for "ad-free browsing" on those sites.
You also have URL shortening services that could trick users into visiting a page that is charging per page view. Unless there were a way to authorize the payment, the system could be abused. Then we're back to managing 100 clicks per day.
Charging per page view would only work for pre-approved sites and have many of the downsides as ads, not sure I like that idea at all. Also micro-transactaions are not necessarily about payments like we are used to them now, but could completely transform how donations worked.
And also paying after the fact, did you like the content? Pay. Not have to wade through ads "paying" for something that turns out was only clickbait, tracking and garbage.
Maybe also the legal framework does not exist (yet). Doing a payment, no matter how small, may require to first accept some legal terms - depending on jurisdiction.
If we weren’t beholden to payment processors, we as users could simply set our browsers to pay $0.001 or $0.000001 for every website we visit with an additional button for “give this site more right now” or “send $ every month“
That would be transparent, cheap, and sustainable.
But the vast majority of people don't want that! If there was a cost every time you visited a website, however small, there would be a constant mental load of evaluating whether each click was worth it. It would be a huge drag on the best aspect of the web.
Not to mention that coordinating it internationally would be next to impossible. Sure, you could add it as an optional feature, and a tiny percentage of people would use it, but it wouldn't make any material difference to websites' bottom lines.
Every time you turn a light switch on or use an appliance, you are being charged for the electricity used to run it; this cost is extremely difficult to track, is different for every device you own, and adds up such that at the end of the month the cost is non-negligible (at least to the point where you probably are paying more on utilities every month than streaming media services)... and yet, while people, in the abstract, care somewhat about reducing their usage of such things like water and electricity (and thereby put in at least a bit of effort to prevent the most egregious of wasted costs), almost no one is crippled by the "mental load of evaluating whether each" time they flip a switch or turn on a faucet is "worth it". It is kind of ludicrous that this argument against micropayments somehow holds as much traction with people as it does when essentially all people experience not only experience the obvious counter-example so often as to be nearly every waking minute of every day, it makes up a significant fraction of their overall expenses.
That's a good point. Obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't considered it. So clearly "micropayments" can work in some situations. That said, I still think when people are used to something being completely free, it will be difficult for them to adjust to paying for it; I do still expect it would add stress for a lot of people in the web context.
I believe if the incremental cost is small, the mental load would mostly fade into the background, just as I am aware that there is a cost every time I turn on the lights or the faucet, but it doesn't have a large impact on my usage except that I remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room and don't leave the faucet running when I soap up the dishes.
(I guess the advertising industry, including Google, lobbied hard against a potential competitor, especially already at the time owned by an adblock company?)
Heck, already Flattr 1.0 did that with its Flattr buttons on websites, but it got pretty much killed off by the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse...
given the context of this article, if you ever get the chance to study the economics of private torrent trackers, i think you’d find it interesting.
every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc.
naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation.
but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day.
Sure, that's why there should be a model like Flattr, but automated: you pay a flat subscription, say 5 or 10$ a month, and that is divided by services/content you use, weighted by time spent.
Upvotes and downvotes have zero real-world stakes.
Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press.
Even if you control the amount, even if it is fractional cents per upvote, you now have to figure out how much it is costing you in real world dollars to upvote people each day/week/month whatever.
Also "I liked this" is different from "This is worth $value to me"
> Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press.
Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that. All I want is a button in my browser (not on websites) that I can configure ahead of time. Perhaps I'd set it to $0.10. Then, when (and only when) I want, I can click on that button, knowing it will attempt to send $0.10 to the website I'm currently viewing, if that website has set up the ability to receive money in this way.
Maybe I won't click it for a week, but then click it ten times on one article (or website) to send a dollar to that site.
I was just using it as an example to illustrate why a micropayment button press is a different and more difficult decision than an upvote, because you asked why those decisions were different.
If you would not use them interchangeably, then of course they are different.
If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with 'viable micropayments' is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.
I disagree. Ads are fine as long as they're actually just passive ads. Sometimes they even show me things I want to buy! It's the surveillance and general impunity around responsibility with people's data that is problematic.
IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.
The fact there is none is because humans are inherently heuristic and ads are the non invasive answer to being around and letting business models happen as any manual micro payments just wouldn't happen. What's our closest buy me a cup of coffee? And that's niche and really only adopted by those who have thought about this problem.
Wikipedia for example gets generous donations from all kinds of people. So paying freely for beneficial services is also known in non nerd circles. Micropayments would really help, spread that to smaller projects/sites, that cannot afford to also build a foundation structure.
> The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads.
A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host).
It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear.
They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom.
They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying.
They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated
They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM.
They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request.
They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement"
They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations.
They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements.
They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.
Well no. Micropayments imply you pay authors. Adsense and other platforms do not require that. Apples and oranges, fyi.
Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy.
You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.
The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, like never before in history have we had this much info about consumers, and yet Hulu chooses to run pharma ads for us all day for conditions that no one we know of have. That, combined with all the ridiculous mobile ads plus complicated cookie BS on the mobile web make it almost unreadable even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. I don't mind paying for content, but publishers still find ways to punish anyone trying to get any kind of a deal, e.g. Apple News+ subscriptions don't work to log in to actual sites, so you can ONLY read most of those via the Apple News app which of course doesn't allow commenting, and doesn't integrate with my feed reader or browser in a way that lets me actually view articles I come across on those publications via other means, so I must find the name + publication of an article, switch to Apple News, try to browse to find that, and usually by that point I just stop caring and go do something else. Another workaround for places like Rolling Stone is to just switch to private browsing and use the however many "free" article views per month...again as someone who technically does pay for access to this content via Apple News+. I feel like I'm slowly arriving at the conclusion that any in-app browsers should be considered harmful on mobile due to the integration and UX headaches they pose. What's so bad about opening the system browser instead of your app's awful skin on top of mobile Safari, with a window that takes up most of the screen but doesn't have all the features of the normal system browser and might close at any point for $reasons....
Is this really the best we can do in 2023, after investing trillions in ad tech over the decades?
> The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind,
> even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device.
Please don't take this as snark but these two statements are not uncorrelated. You're basically saying, "don't send targeted ads" and you're getting what you asked for.
I've put out some feelers for an alternate ad network that I think could do some good, and one of the first traps I ran into is that incentives are not there for the ad network to show us relevant ads. They only care about what the advertiser is willing to pay - Hulu probably COULD show you ads relevant to your life, but the irrelevant pharmaceutical ads pay them more.
I don't know how we get around this. My idea involved an adblocker that tries to let through ads that align with the consumer's long-term goals, with the consumer having the ability to update their preferences in real time, but that's pretty close to facebook's ad model and that's still crap.
So many thoughtful replies, thank you all! After reading them, it sounds like we currently lack a way of paying into an internet commons where funds get distributed to the sites we visit most. Something like a water utility, where its very existence is priceless, but we don't have to think about it each time we turn on the tap, because the unit price of rinsing dishes is almost too cheap to meter. Cryptocurrency has potential to power something like that, but concerns around privacy and having too much money pulled from bank accounts have not been entirely addressed yet.
To flip this on its head, some suggested that we're only looking at internet ads from the supply side. Looking at the demand side might show that people want to actively pay to support websites they enjoy. Especially if that suppresses ads where it's implemented. But there's currently no mainstream way to donate perhaps $5-30 per month to provide a kind of internet universal basic income with zero fees.
Off the top of my head, one of the most popular recipients might be something like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to lobby against dystopian legislation from the RIAA/MPAA, for example. The first legislation to target might be to ban bans and enforce transparency, so that all customers have a guaranteed right to dispute any ban and be restored within say 2 weeks, or be refunded any proceeds from before their account was suspended. Which might get ad companies to do their jobs and stop fraud internally, as well as cultivate competitors who advertize a lower ban rate.
Some good starting points:
Patreon
ACH
FedNow
Faster Payments
SEPA
NPP
Cash App
Google Contributor
Brave Rewards
Zcash's shielded pool
Flattr
Kindle Unlimited
Youtube Premium
Venmo
PayPal
Tell everyone you know about Firefox, uBlock Origin, and SponsorBlock. Get them to install and use it. Work an IT job? Push ad blockers out to any customers who don't outright refuse 'em.
If everybody blocks the ads, advertisers will run them elsewhere and we'll get the Internet back. We might see some collateral damage, like ads embedded into works themselves, but this is easy enough to remedy with SponsorBlock and its ilk.
Adsense had become an abomination.
I have 400GB of content that made over 300k € . After the main domain went offline, now 3 years later I'm putting it back up, they denied everything validation of the new domain.
for laughs i tried to recruit people to make a FOSS banner rotator (or actually multiple formats of it) I imagined it funny to plaster website with advertisements pointing at actually good and free things. I made some banners but this takes time and using names and logos without permission makes it hard to make funny things however noble the effort.
Thankfully no one was interested, more like the opposite. The FOSS community is full of people who passionately hate promotion. If they see it on the horizon they explode in rage.
Meanwhile I cant find things I know must exist and no one knows what I've made. There has to be an answer to the riddle but it takes better men than me.
To downvoter, this is the OP and this is not some hypothetical speculation from a random internet cynic. This is their actual experience with this site. This comment should be highly upvoted, not downed.
I'm not at all suggesting that GP should be downvoted, but just because a person ran a site doesn't mean they thought of and tried all the possibilities for making it work. Do we want to blindly accept all the advice friendster and digg have to give us? Should we accept everything Musk has to say about twitter, or should he simply listen without objection to Jack Dorsey?
I have no idea how often it happens, but I have read anecdotal comments on HN about people having it done to them. Not too long ago there was a person. I can't for the life of me find it now, but some time ago on HN there was a person whose account got banned for upvote gaming, but it wasn't actually him. Fortunately dang let him make his case.
I don’t know. But I suspect they bought some established websites via a marketplace like flippa, that had established earnings (traffic, ad revenue). They then swapped the Adsense account to their own, and discovered that the ad clicks were fraud / bots, which resulted in their entire Adsense account being banned.
There are other ways to monetize, some significantly more profitable than adsense, but yes media buys of shady traffic will most likely cause shady results
What are some of the other ways? (honestly asking).
Premium features and such are a possibility, but I don't really see the value for people to pay for this beyond maybe a tiny community, and they would surely need some premium features in return (like maybe private torrents or something).
Perahps an API, for stats maybe, or something else not sure. Affiliate of VPN or Hosting, or if you know how to code, roll your own VPN service and use that as a traffic source. The hardest thing, at least in my opinion to get on the internet is traffic. That generally only comes with great products, or great branding.
I buy a decent amount of stuff online. I've even seen ads for something and bought it the first time I saw it.
But I would never, ever, buy anything after clicking an ad on a torrent site, even one I knew to be 100% legal and above board. Hell you'd be hard to get me to even click one of the ads in the first place let alone just open a new tab and search for whatever the product was.
The risks are everything from spam to scam to fraud to full-blown identity theft if you click the wrong ad on the wrong site, and all of that can be obviated by just searching for the thing in a new tab 99% of the time. The juice (getting the site owner a fractional percentage of the sale at best, or a fraction of a penny for a click) ain't worth the squeeze IMO.
Is there a particular reason why you chose not to pass the torch? Too few users at this point? Most of the torrents having no seeders?
In any case, your story reminds me of the good ol' days of the web. Back in high school, being able to just put up a cool site and have people magically find it through Google felt like god mode. I never ran anything big like your torrent site (which I'm pretty sure I've visited), but I imagine you got a lot of satisfaction out of having thousands of users.
I miss the days when the web was this simple. Now I constantly question the time investment of creating a website because the (im)material condition has changed so much; the search algorithm is completely different and so many people use a small handful of platforms. Unless you generate eye candy and it goes viral, or it competes with major internet companies, I'm under the impression that you can just forget it.
Good question. I don't have any idea who I would pass it to. If you do, it could be considered!
I also miss the good old days. It all felt smaller looking back, but still huge back then in a lot of ways.
Being found on Google and starting a community off that alone does seem like a pipe dream now, but I think mostly because of how people interact with the web and the platforms they are siloed into by default.
Just don't do it. It's like taking a child from you. Someone else starts to bastardize it, use it in way you don't like etc. And you can't do anything about it, since it's not your thing anymore. I've made this mistake once and it's not a good feeling. Better bury it.
I mean, if it were some super unique thing, then sure I think there might be a some reason to suggest he should open it up.
But nothing about the site is actually technically unique beyond the brand and its history. It means a LOT to OP sentimentally, but if this was doing some kind of amazing social good, someone could just go make a rails app for their CS degree's senior design class and we'd have a functional replacement back.
So, I think OP's decision to bury it makes a lot of sense. It's a very human decision and it doesn't really hurt anyone by him making it, and if you want to be super utilitarian about it, it's probably better to let them peacefully close this chapter and move on to whatever next interesting thing they're going to do rather than sour them on it and have them do their next thing more privately.
As a counter-point, you built this thing in part to give the world something good and uplifting. If you kill the child, you guarantee the outcome of failure.
Sure there's a chance that the person you pass it to goes in a direction you don't like, but there's also a chance it goes on to magnify it's mission. It's such a neat project and something I wish I'd discovered before today (sadlol).
Hell, maybe I'll take it over if you're willing. I'd keep you access to it and grant veto power over any changes you don't like. What's the current stack? LAMP or something else?
Have you considered making it into a software package?
You could take any custom code you wrote (like the layout of the pages) and make a guide on how to remake your site from scratch (what software packages you ran, OS, things like that) and post that to github as open source.
That would allow you to keep your baby but then let your electric grandchildren float off into the internet to see where they might sprout.
Another thing is if you decide to bury it, do not burn any bridges. A few years later you might want to restart it. So make notes, keep everything archived.
I’ve felt this way for a considerable time too. In retrospect, it has now been ten years and yet still nothing has really changed, which I am kinda glad.
I'm interested! I wish I knew about your site before it went down. I run a seedbox, and I've been on the hunt for popular-but-legal torrents to support. I'd be more than happy to take a swing at running your site, if only to be a user myself.
Feel free to reach out if you're genuinely interested in passing on the torch:
I've tried helping keeping and seeding some historical archives, but it gets tedious quickly downloading one by one (and there's not much activity in them anyway). It would be nice if there was a more organized way of helping archival! (like downloading a large chunk of their database and seeding it automatically)
On one of my high seas sites there is an archive team which uses the API to find "at risk" torrents (<3 seeds). People dedicate X TB and have a script that hits the API, finds some at risk torrents then grabs them to seed and repeats till it fills the space alotted to archiving purposes.
Seems like something the IA could implement with some help.
With multiple sources within each tier treated equally.
The general thought process is more about the site disappearing so the focus on sources makes more sense and transcodes can be created trivially if needed for a theoretical new site as needed.
With the IA this is unlikely to be an issue as they'd just want to make sure each torrent has seeds so no real need for prioritization around sources.
If not passing on the torch, would you consider releasing a data set for the ~5500 torrents? I imagine it wouldn't be a huge data set, and it would allow others to build their own websites and continue the work.
I run a small forum for Range Rover enthusiasts, which does occasionally surface on Google but mostly seems to spread by word-of-mouth. That approach is handy if you can reach potential community members via "conventional" mass social media, but want a quiet wee corner to chat in without being marketed at.
what was the monthly running cost? and how much did you earn from ads? (i am guessing it was not that much because it doesn't sound like loosing adsense caused a lot of pain)
I wouldn’t mind the code itself to crib off of. Although the idea of continuing the site as a whole sounds really attractive if the domain name is included.
The author opens up the article saying it was a null routed server issue and he didn't have time or resources to fix it. Maybe that's a new edit from after you read it.
Ya, I am a part of the "problem" so to speak, though I do my best to create content that not only ranks well in a search engine, but is genuinely helpful for the reader.
I suppose it was inevitable in the drive of the commercialization of everything in life?
Just my two cents, but IMHO SEO for useful information is itself a great good. The evil are the people who have low-value content and eclipse the higher value content through gaming.
There isn’t a such thing as “SEO for great content”. The search algorithms don’t reward “great content”. The only way you win is by not playing the game. You have to find other ways to market and have an “unfair advantage”.
How many times have you seen “useful content” buried by paragraphs of word salad to juice SEO?
I'm not sure I understand your argument. "SEO for great content" to me just means you have great content, and you Optimize it for Search Engines so people can fine it easier/higher.
I’m saying simply that what the algorithm cares about and what causes it to rank high is completely orthogonal to “good content”.
Search for any subject where you consider yourself a subject matter expert. Are the top results what you would consider good? This is excluding first party vendor content.
Don't beat yourself up if you were doing SEO the proper way, making content that genuinely appealed to the proper audience, and/or made the content more accessible. I think there are enough people here on HN that understand proper SEO versus trying to game the system.
By simple, I meant in the sense that some kid in high school could put up a site that's not rich in JavaScript, have people find it organically, not need to worry so much about scaling or DDOS, not need to worry about GDPR, not have the expectation of accessibility, and not need to have an iOS and Android app for people to actually use it.
This isn't to say that the same technology used in say 2005 can't be used today. But it's a time investment with not nearly as much of a likelihood of seeing a meaningful return.
Hey, congrats on this project which, as you say, has been a big part of your life. I can really emphasise with that, having run (and shut down) a couple of larger projects previously that were used by a great many people. It's tough to let go sometimes!
Kudos to you for bringing something into the world that did something meaningful. Not to mention all the tangential benefits you mention like learning SEO, hosting, and so on. As good as a degree but without all the drinking.
What I don't get is how this big company called Google can get so big by scraping everyone's data and then indexing it without paying people. And then they have the balls to lock people out from adsense profits if the user makes the tiniest mistake.
I made a few thousand on YouTube in 2011 I believe and then got heavily into web development. In 2015ish I placed some ugly adsense ads on a site I had and was only a couple dollars away from $100 payout. So... I manually clicked an ad like less then 10 times. Sure enough my account got banned from adsense.
It got me completely demotivated from programming and only last year did I pick back up programming. I was using Node.js and Go back then but I'm now into Rust and Erlang. Not sure how I can profit as I lack work history (giving up on self teaching myself programming also meant I took up dead end jobs), but I'm motivated nonetheless. Google, pick on someone your own size.
Clicking repeatedly on your own ads to make money from those clicks? That’s fraud. Blaming your whole life situation on Google banning you for stealing from them? That’s ridiculous.
Take a little responsibility for your actions and situation. “I did fraud and got banned because of it and that ban demotivated me from being a programmer.”
This is not a matter of good or bad, or the absence or presence of ethics. It's a matter of defrauding Google at exactly where their profit is, their cash cow.
To phrase it in another way, if Google wasn't very good at detecting fraud, it would not have been making so much money or becoming such a big company. Billionaires are more likely than not to be absolute misers; the same applies to corporations.
Obviously I'm not condoning clicking on your ads a few times to get the payout. My account got banned and I haven't used adsense since. Everyone uses adblockers anyhow now... But to PERMA ban someone for this small offense (compared to actual fraudsters that use malware to get ad clicks) is insane.
Especially when your company basically controls the internet. I'll repeat what I said before, Google pick on someone your own size.
You probably got automatically banned, it wouldn't be that hard for a program to detect what you described. Browser fingerprinting has existed for years. I doubt anyone at Google is picking on you, specifically.
I owned and operated an adult website for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was primary source of income. It was completely lawful and above board, no user-generated-content so I never once had any issues with controversial content etc. One day last year we get a notice from our bank telling us that we were deemed "high risk" and they were closing our commercial accounts. For months we tried to find any bank or credit union that would take us but they all turned us down.
Someone actually posted our story to HN but it's not really tech related so didn't get many upvotes or engagement.
So I know how devastating it is for ignorance and stupidity on the part of the others to shut down something that a) you worked hard to create yourself and b) was such a huge part of your life for so long. Extreme empathy.
The right to bank should be enshrined in the laws of free societies. I don't care what the business is or what people's moral qualms might be--as long as it is not breaking the law, there is no excuse for cutting off this critical business infrastructure.
It is in Germany, at least for individuals. In practice it's a bit bumpy for immigrants with unrecognised passports and no registered address, but the principle is there and can be enforced with some effort.
There exists regulated markets in which businesses are not free to do anything they want. Banking is already regulated and is a necessity in modern world. Essential banking services should be treated like a utility.
Banks are not companies. They are allowed to create money out of thin air [1], unlike a "normal" company. They are heavily regulated by the government, unlike other companies. They are in fact an essential service in today's world.
Credit isn't unethical. There are a lot of good things that would have never happened without credit.
Even employment is a form of credit. "I'll work X hours on this task, and at this time, you will pay me $X" is an incredibly simplified form of credit.
Borrowing a few bucks to make it to payday from your friends isn't unethical for either the lender or the payer.
Usury is what is unethical about lending, specifically unregulated usury. That, and being allowed to refuse service to people or businesses that you don't like or whose legal business your stakeholders find distasteful.
If you're in the banking or finance business, you shouldn't be allowed to choose to not provide service for citizens who are performing legal business, and you should have the amount of profit that you make from a lending transaction regulated and limited by a third party whose goal is to ensure equal treatment.
See Fractional Reserve Banking for the gory details, but the gist of it is, private banks create money out of thin air (within limits) so they can lend it to you. And then they charge interest back for it.
That's not how it should work. First there's the morally questionable interest rates to begin with (not all societies or religions permitted that), but even if we assume it is legitimate, the justification for this is something about investment and risk taking. Which are supposed to involve your own funds, not money you printed out of thin air.
But there is a risk, and there is a service. How should they charge for it? Well, it's simple: risks are supposed to be (and are) handled by insurances. And then there's the paperwork and checking and all that that most likely should involve a flat rate. This should be much more ethical than charging interest over money that didn't even exist to begin with.
(Edit: 3 downvotes in 30 minutes, no rebuttal… guess I hit a nerve. I'll just say this: if you disagree with anything I've said here so strongly that you feel the need to downvote it, at least take the time necessary to articulate to yourself why.)
I'm very familiar with fractional reserve banking, thanks.
>the justification for this is something about investment and risk taking. Which are supposed to involve your own funds, not money you printed out of thin air.
Money is socially constructed. If we agree, societally and legally, that banks can lend out most of the money that their depositors place with them (fractional reserve), then the money the bank lends out is no less real, no more "printed out of thin air," than any other money. And we do agree to that statement, legally and (for the vast majority) societally.
> risks are supposed to be (and are) handled by insurances.
Which is exactly how banks handle interest rates on loans. This is why we have credit scores: so that the underwriter at the bank can assess how risky your proposed loan is, and how much interest (i.e. premium) to charge you. Exactly like an insurance underwriter assesses how risky your proposed insurance policy is and how much premium to charge you. Both insurance and banking largely automate these decisions these days, but there are still human underwriters who can override the automated decisions.
A few years ago I briefly worked in the credit risk department of a bank, and as part of my orientation I spent an afternoon sitting with one of these underwriters watching and listening as they dealt with clients who wanted to appeal the automated credit decisions.
> And then there's the paperwork and checking and all that that most likely should involve a flat rate
This also already exists, it's called an origination fee.
> This should be much more ethical than charging interest over money that didn't even exist to begin with.
In summary, this is completely wrong. The money does exist, just as much as any other money exists, and if it's not repaid the lender is on the hook for it[1], just like any other money. And the way you think lending should work is indistinguishable from the way it already works.
[1] Or, in many cases, the person who bought the loans from the originating bank.
> And the way you think lending should work is indistinguishable from the way it already works.
With one crucial difference: right now the main criterion is whether the bank will get reimbursed or not. Whether it will make money off of the credit. And credits are so important to our lives right now that I don’t believe such an important decision should be left to that kind of invisible hand.
I mean, it’s as important, perhaps more important, than the state’s budget. This suggests, if not a democratic oversight, at the very least a clear set of democratically chosen rules over what kind of loans should be given.
I'd flip that around: whether it will lose money off the credit, not whether it will make money. Based on my time in credit risk this is more accurate to how banks actually think about loans. The upside for each individual loan is much smaller than the downside, so the threat of loss dominates the discussion.
Once you flip it around like that it becomes much less attractive to think of forcing banks to make loans that they expect to lose money on.
> if not a democratic oversight, at the very least a clear set of democratically chosen rules over what kind of loans should be given.
Which, again, we already have. There are many rules and regulations about what information banks may and may not take into account when deciding which loans to approve, and what interest rate to charge. Rules put in place and enforced by the democratically elected government.
> Once you flip it around like that it becomes much less attractive to think of forcing banks to make loans that they expect to lose money on.
That's not what I'm proposing, though. I'm proposing that each loan would come with the creation of central money, such that any that falls through results in nothing more than a little bit of inflation. And the people who issue the loans would effectively be government workers. Or contractors or whatever, but they would do all this on behalf of the state.
> Which, again, we already have.
I have to confess ignorance here. Do we have rules that forbid specific industries from contracting loans? (Industries that are otherwise legal, I mean.)
There's no difference between "central" money and other money, though. It's all just money.
> Do we have rules that forbid specific industries from contracting loans?
Regulations differ by jurisdiction, but generally you can't do any kind of banking business without being licensed specifically as a bank. For example, if you get a car loan "from the dealership" it's not actually the dealership giving you the loan, but a bank that they partner with.
You misunderstood my question. I was asking, are there industries, say Oil or Porn, who are by law or regulation forbidden to borrow money from any bank?
>>See Fractional Reserve Banking for the gory details, but the gist of it is, private banks create money out of thin air (within limits) so they can lend it to you. And then they charge interest back for it.
So I've googled and read upon it every time I hear this almost exact same sentence (and I see it every now and then), and I don't get it at a basic level. I have little to none awareness of high level finance, but my understanding of 'fractional reserve banking' is thus:
1. 100 people deposit $1 each to a bank. It has $100 of deposits
2. Without fractional reserve banking, bank would basically have to keep $100 in its vaults. It would be useless money going nowhere doing nothing.
3. With fractional reserve banking, bank basically has to (say) keep $10 in its vaults (digital as they may be), but can loan $90 to other entities (and do more complicated things with it). There are risks and benefits to this, and it is basically a full time job of many people at the bank and regulator to find various balances of risk and benefit, to bank and society, based on the policy and goal.
I don't understand where, in this simple math, does a regular bank "create money out of thin air". I'd love to understand when and how this may be the case (but NOT via angry youtubers, please:).
I do understand that central banks and/or the government control circulation and "create money" through various mechanisms, but I never get the feeling that is what we're talking about when people say "fractional reserve banking means private banks get to make money up".
> I don't understand where, in this simple math, does a regular bank "create money out of thin air".
Through rinse & repeat.
When the bank has loaned those $90, the deposits still show $100, and are still available to their respective owners. Just not all at once, but we don’t care as long as the illusion is maintained — and it is.
Where those $90 go? to other deposits. So where we had $100, we now have $190. Only $100 of those are central money, but again, as long as the illusion is maintained (and it is), everything works exactly as if we had $190. And since money is but a convention, a good enough illusion is actually real. $90 really have been created.
And those $90 that have been added to deposits can also be used to lend money. $81 in the current example. So now we have $271. Rinse & repeat indefinitely, eventually you end up with up to $1000 total, with $900 created out of thin air. As long as the illusion works at least. And it does.
Sure, sometimes it breaks down. Sometimes we get a bank run. But in practice the illusion is so important that the state steps it an make it real: by creating actual central money to compensate for the bank run. Heck, often just the promise of doing so is enough to prevent the bank run in the first place, and maintain the illusion.
Strictly speaking money hasn’t been created. It’s just an accounting trick. But the trick works. Those $900 may be fake money, but if people are using it (and they are), it’s also real money. It’s not real real money, but it’s close enough.
> but we don’t care as long as the illusion is maintained — and it is.
> as long as the illusion is maintained (and it is)
> a good enough illusion is actually real.
> As long as the illusion works at least.
> But in practice the illusion
> maintain the illusion.
You sure like that word.
It's not an illusion. The money is real. It's real real. It's real real. There is nothing fake or illusory about it. It is just as equally real as a $100 bill straight from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Stop pretending that it's not.
> But in practice the illusion is so important that the state steps it an make it real: by creating actual central money to compensate for the bank run. Heck, often just the promise of doing so is enough to prevent the bank run in the first place, and maintain the illusion.
This is false. FDIC is insurance. The money that is used to step in and rescue a bank is real money that comes from banks that pay insurance premiums to have their depositors' money insured. It's not "central money" created by the state. It's exactly the same kind of money that banks lend out to you and me. Banks pay insurance premiums to the FDIC and when a bank fails the FDIC uses those insurance premiums to step in and insure the deposits.
> Strictly speaking money hasn’t been created.
This is also false. Money really is created when banks give out loans based on fractional reserves. This is called the money multiplier effect, and it's a really important economic factor. But it's not fake money, it's real money. Real real money.
Yeah, the money is real. Yeah the money has been created. But you can't start from there when explaining it to a sceptic.
And there's still is one way the money isn't real: if everyone runs to the bank to retrieve their money they can't. Not all at the same time. But they never do, so the money is real.
> This is false. FDIC is insurance. The money that is used to step in and rescue a bank is real money that comes from banks that pay insurance premiums to have their depositors' money insured.
Oh, I see. A tad more complicated than I though, but the effect is the same, so my central point remains.
---
My step dad used to work in banks, and you, he, and I agree on how this all works. Interestingly though he didn't want to see it as "creating" money. He didn't quite accept the connotation, and I suspect the full consequences of fractional reserve. His exact word was that banks are authorised to transform money (which I suspect is a legal term in France).
> Well, it's simple: risks are supposed to be (and are) handled by insurances.
So the banks charge a 5.75% “risk premium” and we’re back where we started.
And just because some cultures and religions are anti-usuary doesn’t invalidate it’s value. All interest does is price the value of money (ignoring all the shenanigans the central banks get up to). Money today is worth more than money tomorrow so you have to pay a premium to both access it and compensate the owner for the lost utility.
Yeah, fractional reserve lending is fraud but it’s legal fraud so what are you going to do?
I don't understand how it's fraud. Banks could not lend at all if they must retain 100% of deposits.
On the lending side, it would hurt everyday people and the economy if banks could not lend. Loans are important for homeowners (mortgages) and for businesses of all sizes (research and development).
On the savings side, your community bank provides incredible guarantees with your deposit that are difficult to find elsewhere: deposits are very liquid, principle is virtually guaranteed, and convenience in routing the money wherever you direct it.
Yes, banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it, and the way we’re making the economy work needs money to be created for those loans. So they definitely fill a need. However they are printing money and decide who can borrow and who cannot, without democratic oversight.
We tend to reduce democracy down to restrictive laws & regulations. Whether we want guns or not. Whether we want to allow abortion or not. How heavy the penalties are for murder or theft. How a given industry should be regulated. But resource allocation is arguably even more important.
How we allocate our resources determine pretty much everything in our lives. It’s the choice between more roads or new train tracks, which industry should be prioritised, basically what direction our whole economy should take. And that, instead of being subjected to democratic oversight, is currently left to private interests, with a vague hope that it will somehow be okay, because "invisible hand" or something.
Damn, I’m just asking for more democracy, and there we are, way outside the Overton window.
>>banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it
I feel there's shifty language and moving posts all the time.
Fractional reserve banking, to my limited understanding and your previous post, is lending some of the money that got deposited to. Where is this "creating money" (for non central banks) coming from? The phrase comes in and out of various conversations about banking system and it's the most slippery thing I've ever seen. Can you please elaborate on your understanding of how "banks create money" so we can have a discussion from same basic understanding and principles?
And it's not "banks couldn't lend as much money". If we didn't have fractional reserve banking, it feels banks could not lend AT ALL. This is not shades of gray, it feels like a basic principle. If a bank gets deposits, and can't do anything with deposits, and has to keep all the deposits in a vault, then it cannot do any loans. SImplified and all, but again, I want to see if our basic understanding is in line.
Also, what does "more democracy" concretely mean here, as nice as the phrase is? Aren't regulations by government the spear of the democracy, in practical sense?
More or less. Long story short, when money is lent in a bank, it’s then deposited elsewhere, and then it can be lent again, such that with a fractional reserve of 10% you can ultimately multiply the amount of money in all deposited accounts by 10. In other words, a whole bunch of money just got created. It’s not central money, but it’s still money.
You could maybe try to counter with "but but but bank runs", but if this happens the state tend to print central money to compensate, thus actualising the money creation that happened with fractional reserve banking alone.
> If we didn't have fractional reserve banking, it feels banks could not lend AT ALL.
They could lend their own money.
> Also, what does "more democracy" concretely mean here, as nice as the phrase is?
In this particular instance I’m thinking of full reserve banking (deposit banks turn back into glorified vaults), print central money for mortgages (and burn that money when it’s paid back), and democratically (with congress, referendum, whatever) define clear criteria about who can contract mortgages, and what for. Criteria which would then be enforced by mortgage clerk, on behalf of the state.
The point here is that instead of letting private interests that want to make money decide, the people decide (possibly through elected officials) of the applicable criteria.
> this particular instance I’m thinking of full reserve banking (deposit banks turn back into glorified vaults), print central money for mortgages (and burn that money when it’s paid back), and democratically (with congress, referendum, whatever) define clear criteria about who can contract mortgages, and what for.
This is an interesting idea. The problem with a single lender is that it removes incentives for good customer service and (sometimes) good products. Monopolies, whether public (DMV) or private (your local cable company) are universally hated. It would be difficult to design the right incentives for the government to provide a good product.
I think the main disconnect is that deposit banks never operated as a glorified vault. Lending against deposits is supposed to be understood by anyone entering that agreement. I understand why it may be a surprise when you first learn about fractional reserves because it may not fit an existing mental model. Instead, it seems unfair that a bank can create money. But it's not. Money supply and money velocity is a term used by economists to describe how much and how quickly money exchanges hands. The world's accounting books, with all debits and credits, always sum to the same total: however much money the central bank has printed.
There are a lot of benefits of the current system (liquidity, virtual guarantee of withdrawal, conveniences). Your proposal would replace a system where you receive a small income from your deposits to a system that steadily decreases the size of your deposits; I think that would be a hard sell.
> Monopolies, whether public (DMV) or private (your local cable company) are universally hated.
I believe that's mostly a US thing. Here in France we love state monopoly on tap water, energy, and trains and snail mail service… Privatising those and opening them to competition generally caused more problems than it solved.
> Lending against deposits is supposed to be understood by anyone entering that agreement.
The only agreement most people understand, at the most basic level, is that money they deposit can be retrieved at any time. The idea that a bank run could even be a thing nowadays feels outlandish (I don't know the particular, but I understand that we have put various mechanims in place to make bank runs very unlikely, if at all possible).
> Your proposal would replace a system where you receive a small income from your deposits
I don't receive any income from my regular bank account. I even pay a small fee for the privilege of having that account. The things that pay interest back are special accounts, some of which I don't have immediate access to. For those the bank is very clear that it will use that money to invest in stuff, justifying why there's a return on interest at all.
Now if we went all the way to forbidding investment accounts, sure, every bit of inflation means your money is evaporating over time. I'm actually okay with that. It's a form of tax, with a flat rate, that rich people with a ton of money will pay more than the small folks. But yeah, it sure would be a hard sell to those rich people.
> banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it
How could a bank lend _any_ money if it must reserve 100% of deposits as cash?
> they are printing money and decide who can borrow and who cannot, without democratic oversight
I do not understand how regulations are equivalent to democracy. Either way, banks are heavily regulated in the G7 countries. Such regulation was thought to exacerbate the mortgage crisis of 2008 because regulations created incentives to offer mortgages to people who should not have qualified.
Supply and demand of deposits and loans creates a competitive market - banks operate with razor thin margins.
I still do not know how you would improve upon the current system.
> How could a bank lend _any_ money if it must reserve 100% of deposits as cash?
That’s the thing though, they could lend out and pay interest on “savings” with the understanding that the money might not be immediately available for withdrawal as it’s “in the wild”.
And a different class of banking, we’ll call it “checking”, would allow for immediate withdrawal as it’s backed by 100% reserves and doesn’t pay interest because it doesn’t make any money for the bank. Heck, they might even charge for the convenience of warehousing your money and being able to transfer it to any other economic actor you chose through a novel intra-bank clearinghouse.
What this doesn’t allow is for banks to lend out 90% of every dollar they take in — even ones available for immediate withdrawal.
As we’ve seen from the recent SVB[0] catastrophe if people assume their money is immediately available and it isn’t there’s big problems because everyone rushes to get their money right now instead of maybe getting their money at a later date. Big problem…
This is all stuff they figured out centuries ago, the main problem is it cuts into the banks’ profits so it isn’t done this way.
[0] as an illustration of the problem, they didn’t seem to get in trouble due to fractional reserve lending but from the liquidity of their assets.
> That’s the thing though, they could lend out and pay interest on “savings” with the understanding that the money might not be immediately available for withdrawal as it’s “in the wild”.
Those are Certificates of Deposit.
> they didn’t seem to get in trouble due to fractional reserve lending but from the liquidity of their assets.
It was the opposite. SVB had over-invested in long-term US treasuries, which are extremely liquid, but were falling in price due to the rapid increase of interest rates. If not for withdrawals squeezing their reserve, SVB could hold onto those treasuries until maturity and get back 100% of their principle.
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I think the disconnect is that savings accounts are not popularly well understood. People are shocked when they understand that the money they deposited is not sitting in a big vault.
You could tweak fractional reserves to be 20% (or 80%) of deposits, but that comes at a cost too. For example, it would create scarcity of money available for lending, which in turn would make loans more expensive (e.g., higher interest rate mortgages could double the cost of home ownership.)
The current system prevents the worst of bank runs by covering a good chunk of assets with insurance (FDIC in the US). It's a system that allows banks to fail and protect customer deposits.
The collapse of SVB was not a "catastrophe" because the banking system is intended to let banks fail. The alternative is far worse.
> Yeah, fractional reserve lending is fraud but it’s legal fraud so what are you going to do?
Isn’t that obvious? We’re living in an increasingly oppressive regime, and fractional reserve banking is but one of its many symptoms. So we’re going to do whatever people do under oppressive regimes.
Do you have the link to original story and HN post?
The engagement on HN tends to be due to interest in story but also time of day and other stories and specific wording of title and other fickle factors. I find that HN has a lot of interest in freedom of expression and how it interacts with banking sector, but sometimes topics slip nonetheless.
The story was posted before we closed, and we had put up a notice to our visitors explaining that we were trying to find alternate banking arrangements and would have to shut down if we couldn't.
If you visit the site today, there is still some NFSW content, so beware. But it also has all of the details of the history of the site as well as what led to us having to shut it down if anyone is interested.
So I use 4g net connection here in the UK and just tried to load what I assume is the site? coedcherry.com? I got a vodaphone (uk mobile phone co whose network I'm apparently connected via) nag page asking me to confirm me age, we protect young mobile users blah blah blah. Which... I have never seen before in the six months I've been using this connection. Any other porn site even massive ones like xvideos works fine, but coedcherry does not?
Which is very odd. I'm really rather perplexed as to why your site would be blocked but the biggest porn site on the net is not if the purpose here is to block childrens access to porn.
I used to hit this all the time when I lived in the UK. One of the first things you have to do when you get a SIM card there is ask the provider to turn off their "block randomly selected websites" function. At one point mine was blocking Wikipedia.
Very interesting. Also a bit scary how the government can basically shut down any business under the broad guise of “anti-money-laundering”. The level of detail that they wanted from you is basically like “Provide step-by-step instructions for someone at this bank to copy your business and capture your profits”.
Ah; I bet if title was "Legal Canadian adult site forced shut down due to billing processor" or something that provided context, it might have gotten more traction. Otherwise "Random site you've never heard of shutting down" does not entice interest necessarily :-/
( edit: Also, in your "Fuck Banks" page, I'm assuming " pay for offense expenses" is meant to be "pay for office expenses", in which case you may want to change it as "offense expenses" would go against much of the rest of the message of your post :-> )
> we will be ending our banking relationship with Amber-Lace Entertainment Ltd.[0]
> We found out, after connecting with industry colleagues, was that they all thought we were pretty dumb having the business name we do and were surprised this didn't happen way sooner.
The name isn't what killed the business in my opinion because it is quite tame. Your risk was probably evaluated by some automatic process and no innocuous name could have saved it.
would you be open to chat via email? I'm also in Ontario Canada. Every time I breach this type of thing to a non-IT person, they say "oh, porn sites are all sex trafficking and exploitative work", which doesn't feel mathematically true. I'm not a journalist or anything, but would as personal curiosity love to hear an (ex-)operator's perspective :)
> I'm also in Ontario Canada. Every time I breach this type of thing to a non-IT person, they say "oh, porn sites are all sex trafficking and exploitative work", which doesn't feel mathematically true.
Unfortunately this thread is definitely not the only example of perfectly-legal, but adult-industry[-adjacent] people being cut off from banking. Credit card processing is even worse.
It's not only adult. A huge range of legitimate industries are effectively cut off from easy banking & payment processing. This doesn't prevent those industries from existing, it just protects the monopoly of the large players in those industries, who can afford to have their legal team sit down with the bank / payment processor's legal team.
> One day last year we get a notice from our bank telling us that we were deemed "high risk" and they were closing our commercial accounts. For months we tried to find any bank or credit union that would take us but they all turned us down.
In August of 2022, Visa was facing a lawsuit that alleged they were assisting PornHub of profiting off of child porn [0].
This likely caused the card companies, as well as affiliated banks, to re-evaluate their customers and get any adult site off, including the user at the top of this comment thread.
Was his site allowing user-generated content? No. Was he at risk of facilitating child porn? Also no. Would the banks and card companies be willing to research that and make exceptions for a single account? Unlikely.
Ironically, MindGeek (also a Canadian company and the parent company of PornHub) is still in business. One of our former sponsors banks with a credit union in Quebec and that very Credit Union turned us down too. Our takeaway was that you'll get an exception if you're doing millions in transactions and are a huge corporation, but the "little guys" can GTFO.
> a credit union in Quebec and that very Credit Union turned us down too
Perhaps somewhat impractical, but a quick skim of Ontario's credit union laws does not seem to preclude a credit union operated by a trade association of pornographers, or similar, to provide personal and commercial banking services to that community.
I'm surprised given Quebec is one of the porn capitals of the world. Given how much money flows through you'd think at this point the porn producers would just form their own credit union!
I know the French Canadians have a reputation for being open-minded (judging by the attitude toward the LGBT community at least, from what I've been told).
I ran a web site and our e-commerce all ran through PayPal, about $2m a year. One competitor would email PayPal on a weekly basis to tell them we were selling CSAM which was a really great way to get PayPal to instantly block all payments while they investigated.
In fairness to PayPal, and the reason for my reply, is that PayPal's tech staff would go to town and do a very thorough investigation of our entire site, including the back end, to make sure it wasn't true, and then would restore the account. So, some companies do have the staff and willingness to actually make the effort to investigate. I had no problem with PayPal doing it, I just wish they didn't block first, but they were simply covering themselves and I totally understand their business position.
They never said. Not chargebacks though because we never sold directly to customers. We promoted affiliate programs and would get paid by our sponsors (electronically or by mailing us physical checks).
I can't pay my accountant, utility bills or my property taxes with Bitcoin though. At some point that money needs to be converted to fiat which means I still need a commercial account. And to maintain a commercial account in current year, "Know Your Customer" regulations force the bank to ask you an insane amount of details about your business activities and cash flow.
Even if they didn't, bringing in $120k / year into the account from a crypto exchange would raise a lot of questions and that, in and of itself, would likely get branded "high risk" by the bank since there is a perception that 100% of Bitcoin activity is money laundering.
You could have an old school exchange where people go in person to shout bids and offers and settle with briefcases full of $100 bills. Those can be used to pay accountants, utility bills and property taxes.
Accountants have KYC and AML obligations too. Briefcases full of cash are not going to sit well with a legit accountant (and a non-legit accountant is worse than none).
It you live in a big city, it's easy enough to find someone to meet in person and exchange crypto for $1-10k cash a few % below the market rate. Some will even pay above market rate if you can do $100k+.
> it's easy enough to find someone to meet in person and exchange crypto for $1-10k cash a few % below the market rate. Some will even pay above market rate if you can do $100k+
In case anyone is wondering, this is money laundering, and if you wind up with the wrong person on the other side, getting arrested and charged is among the better outcomes.
At least with respect to US federal money laundering laws (18 USC 1956, et seq.), there needs to be “specified unlawful activity”, as defined, involved for it to be money laundering.
I think what they are saying is that the counter-party in the in-person BTC/USD trade could have gotten those USD in an illegitimate way, and that by accepting those USD in exchange for BTC you’d be partaking in money laundering.
Is there really a legal responsibility placed on an individual selling BTC for cash to verify the source of funds?
I assumed that wouldn't be necessary if not operating like a business with the intention to turn a profit. If I sold my car for cash, would I have the same responsibility?
In what way would that help? At the end of the day the company will need to pay taxes and employees will need to be paid (who in turn also need to pay taxes on that). That basically forces conversion to fiat via a bank account that they cannot obtain.
All crypto has done is add an extra layer of complexity on top of the fundamental problem.
> All crypto has done is add an extra layer of complexity on top of the fundamental problem.
In the West - maybe, but check pornolab.net - they are asking for crypto donations right now. They can’t get anything else (but for a different reason) but they can make use of crypto.
Yes, adopt a crypto currency that one day is worth 45k, and a month later it's worth 30k, and a month after that it's worth 20k, and 2-3 months later it's 15k (that's what happened in the second half of 2022)
You would need to hire a crypto savvy trader to distribute your risks over several currencies and exchanges.. and when you reaches $250,000 in valuation (which hopefully the employee tells you it is), you need to hire a second to make sure it all doesn't disappear in an uninsured irretrievable early retirement package for the trader.
You basically have to set up a crypto business along with your actual business idea... Compared to traditional small business where you can hire an accountant to do payroll for just a few hours, and you have next to no risk your accountant can easily run off with millions of your dollars that you can't get back.
Yep. The ability and willingness of banks and payment processors to play morality police is a perfect case study in the utility of cryptocurrencies. They ain't perfect, but "inconvenient to turn this payment into dollars to pay bills" is a considerable improvement over "no payment at all", and the sibling comments poo-pooing over said inconvenience are missing the point and letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Bitcoin is probably a barrier to entry, meaning the "users" in this industry don't all know or understand how to use Bitcoin, and so this would mean losing a portion of their less tech savvy userbase. On the other hand, almost everyone (who is online and able to purchase things) knows how to use a credit card.
Losing a portion of the less tech savvy userbase is a strict improvement over losing the entirety of the userbase due to an inability to take payments at all.
Like I answered to a sibling comment, I mistook who his customers were: advertisers! If we are talking about advertisers, switching to crypto makes way more sense.
No, but they are pragmatic. I understand this is simply a way to sidestep payment problems related to anti-porn regulations, not an ideological "crypto freedom" thing.
The advertisers are aware of what business the website is in, they want to advertise there, but the owner's bank closed his account.
It would be a different story if there were a simple and straightforward method to convert a crypto into cash directly with the handler, but until a major credit card company is willing to tackle that burden crypto may not be the answer.
It's not chargebacks specifically, but you can find a handful of articles and websites detailing how MasterCard and Visa in particular deciding that they will not allow certain kinds of adult content.
They flex this by putting leverage on the banks to not support this either, as they could lose the ability to work with Visa or Mastercard if they start doing banking outside their TOS.
There are some reasons why this could be a good thing - pornography is an industry rife with problems of trafficking, abuse, etc. and denying funding of that kind of behaviour is not without reason. But this tends to spill over to just about everything that /isn't/ abusive as well, which leads to adult sites and the like not being able to secure their own funding or get support from banks.
> pornography is an industry rife with problems of trafficking, abuse, etc.
In my experience in the industry that is perception, not reality. There were a few cases to make the news cycle, like the Girls Do Porn lawsuit and the MindGeek/PornHub controversy with user-submitted content.
But precisely because of public perception the adult industry tends to be pretty good at self-regulating in my experience and opinion. I remember getting an email from a sponsor of mine several years ago telling us that their content could in no way be associated with text that includes "drunk / drinking / intoxicated" etc. and they told us that we had to change the copy on the pages that featured their content. Consent is a huge topic and way more nuanced than most people assume.
The finance industry on the other hand? We're talking about institutions that fund weapons dealers and warlords. With global investments from rights-infringing countries. Not to mention the white collar crime and corruption that comes out of that industry.
Public perception of the adult industry being "rife with problems" stems from the taboo and ideology IMO. Nothing is without problems, but it's all relative and some industries do have it worse than others.
What you say matches my suspicions. In the end, the problem is that sex is taboo -- coincidentally the same thing that makes many porn websites "tick" -- and the conservative sectors of society will find a way to be alarmed about it. So getting alarmed about trafficking in porn to me seems like getting alarmed about cars being used to abduct kids and therefore trying to ban cars because of this.
High Risk of annoying "interest group" complaints. There's a lot of evidence about how much just a couple of loony religious groups send thousands of complaints each year to Visa/Mastercard/etc about every company they don't like, and that in turn affects Visa/Mastercard/et al's pressure/relationship with banks.
You'd think that annoying complaints from a minority of self-righteous people wouldn't have so much power in banking, but they seem to get listened to time and again.
No one has put forth a satisfactory explanation for this, in my humble opinion. There's lots of speculation that it has to do with chargebacks, or lawsuits over revenge porn or something. But nothing more than speculation.
High risk business, other businesses are classified as the same when you try to sign up for a merchant bank account, like investment services and marijuana companies.
Our website did not sell anything direct to consumer. Our "customers" were "advertisers" (affiliate programs that supplied us with content and either mailed us a physical commission check or pay out electronically). There was no payment processing of any sort. What we needed to do was clear physical checks and receive deposits from electronic / online banking services like PayPal and Paxum. We had a business credit card which we used to pay for things like web hosting, and we had 3 bank accounts: a chequing account, business savings and US currency. We did not have a merchant account.
It wasn't that the bank refused to process payments for us. They refused to hold our money and handle every day banking transactions like bill payments.
Exactly what brazzy said. Lots of rights for individual persons, but businesses need to be complete open books about their activities (Know Your Customer regulations) and banks have ultimate discretion when it comes to who they want to do business with.
We consulted with a lawyer, not because we thought what our bank did was actionable, but just to explore options. First thing our lawyer said to us is "I want to make sure that you're not expecting that I can waive my magic lawyer wand and force the bank to reverse their decision right?" Of course we didn't expect that, but I did want to know if we had any rights that were being infringed and I had a few ideas about what to do with the business's money should the worst case scenario play out and I wanted to get a legal opinion and advise.
I think that in France it does exist such a right for individuals AND businesses. Any individuals or business that have been denied a bank account should be able to get a designated bank by the Banque de France.
Here's the form for businesses: https://particuliers.banque-france.fr/sites/default/files/me...
Yes it was profitable. That was one of the painful parts. I re-entered the job market in 2018 but my wife and I maintained the business in our free time with my employer's knowledge and consent. The business was feeding into our life savings, had a lot of assets and we had about 500k unique visitors per day (not huge but nothing to scoff at either). Our bandwidth bills were our major expense. All of that was taken from us because of prudish anti-porn attitudes and fear.
Also, from what our visitors often told us, there was a perception that our site was 100% ad-free. This is because the content was all there to promote affiliate programs. I know that it's common for people to ask "why would anyone pay for porn when there is so much free stuff out there?" My 18 year "career" in the industry taught me that it is a symbiotic relationship. The free stuff advertises for the subscription based sites, and neither would exist without the other.
This is fascinating to me, and sad to hear. Have you ever written about the history and starting up of your website from the business side of things, aside from the shutdown? I've thought about starting a similar business and would love to hear more.
Should have accepted Bitcoin or crypto and moved hosting to a more crypto friendly country? Sounds like an ideal use case for decentralized payments if I ever saw one.
Hey, I remember this site! Definitely a cool place, when I was in high school and interested in technology and P2P it gave me a place to find torrents to experiment with, without the risk of getting in trouble with my parents over illegal downloads. Also found some cool open source software and CC-licensed music (mostly nerdcore rap lol) in the process.
> I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later.
> I ran it out of my bedroom at my parents house for a long time, eventually switching over to a VPS sometime when I moved out.
This brings back many memories from my high school and early college days. I used to run a file and image hosting site (legal content only), and it's amusing to think about the lengths I went to save money. My domain purchase (.com for $8/year or so) felt like a significant investment. I managed to host the site with a considerable number of users out of my parent's basement on a 768kbps upload DSL connection for several years. Eventually, I migrated to a VPS that cost me around $20/month.
I ended up selling the site to another hosting service for approximately $700 because it became too much work. In retrospect, I'm guessing it was a no-brainer move for them since they acquired something like 10k users for $700, but from my perspective, I was happy to receive $700.
Money is a weird thing when you are young. I somehow made things work even without it, but now that I have more of it I use it at every opportunity to not have to deal with things I don’t want to.
It means you buy other peoples' time with your money so you don't have to spend your own time. Conversely, you spend your own time so you don't have to buy other peoples' time with your money.
Does it matter? Make the list available with the caveat "these were the links when I shut down, current status unknown" and you'd still have done a great service.
This is really interesting. You said your brother helped out by posting comments to make it seem more active, do you think that was an important part of its success? I always wonder how sites like this get over the initial evil cycle of no users => no one wants to use it => no users etc.
"In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username."
A long time ago, the main three sites I visited daily were Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Reddit only had (I believe) a few thousand users at the time and /hot was mostly populated in roughly equal parts with links to content about obscure programming languages/techniques, news articles, and links to content about illicit drugs/weed. I was only semi-interested in the first and not at all in the last two, so I dropped it from my rotation thinking, "man, this is never going to take off."
This is interesting. Three websites, at the time pretty much interchangeable, yet one flourished and other two died. Predicting which one would win would've been impossible. VCs invest in all three and hope for the best.
The content here isn’t fake, so I don’t think this strongly resembles generative AI. As far as I know it’s also legal to astroturf in this way because there’s no claim that every poster is a real user. Even today there are Reddit bots although by convention they make themselves obvious.
IANAL but if one were to claim in public that the fake users were real (and there were actual damages) then that may well be actionable in a court of law.
I don't think this (comments by someone for commercial reasons not being indicated as such) is legal in the UK, I can't cite the legislation on it. Pretty sure it was in the raft of business requirements that the EU bundled, one of which was business being required to provide a trading address.
Even if you did claim every user was real, how would that be illegal? Defrauding investors is illegal. But fake users isn’t necessarily defrauding investors.
It isn't fake, it is just created by another user.
I personally have multiple accounts on multiple sites.
None of them are fake, all are well behaved I think, but there are some things that are best said with an account linked to my name and some things that are not a problem to discuss pseudonymously that could create major hassle for someone if it was connected to a name.
What's curious is that it's seen as a standard method of gaining traction for your website but Reddit, at least, now "strongly discourages" using alts in this manner.
> It isn't fake, it is just created by another user.
It's not "just created by another user," it's created by the owners under multiple false names meant to give the impression that it's multiple people (sock-puppeting) and that those people are not the owners (literal shilling.)
It's an obvious fraud, but the law is probably far behind. Who would sue unless there were some financial risk involved, and without financial risk who would even have standing to sue?
If you squinted real hard you'd claim that your time was wasted, and then value your time as a function of revenue earned from your views, and set up a class action suit for everyone who had ever viewed that site and been thusly defrauded.
.......and promptly win about $1.98 in the process.
This would actually be a great (albeit ethically dubious growth hack) way to leverage LLMs…wire up a script that can create some amount of user accounts, then have them talk to each other in comments or forum threads that are started around various seed keywords.
I agree this has probably already been happening, but it would be an interesting project nonetheless.
It would also be interesting to make a forum that’s completely upfront about it. Just make it a feature. Make them post on a realistic schedule to keep the forums idling. Ultimately not that useful but it would be interesting to play with.
Or make it a game. Make some persona for someone that is an expert in something and a prick. The game is to argue with them and convince enough of the other accounts that you’re right.
You know, I thought it did but now it seems to work? Unless it's a different archive site, but in the past I couldn't view the unpaywalled links people posted because the firewall said the site is in the Russian Federation.
In fact I just found out about 12ft.io like a week or 2 ago and bookmarked it for that reason.
Archive.is does embed links to mail.ru but that requires javascript. The site itself does not require javascript which is why I suppose I never really notice it. I could see firewall vendors flagging it for that reason.
Interesting. Oh also forgot the question about the vendor but I'm pretty sure it's zscaler? Unless there's something else behind the scenes that's catching sites, there's no branding on the error page other than my org's, it's completely whitelabeled.
Would have been nice to get one last copy of the site on archive.org before it was shut down. If you still have the content and can bring it online temporarily, it could be grabbed by ArchiveBot:
> That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks.
I love stories like these. Just a hacker doing some hacking.
"The early days was where a lot of time was spent trying to tell people about the website. Some of my fondest memories are of being at school on Digg.com (back before the v4 fiasco of course) and posting comments to the Upcoming / Hot section where stories were at right before they hit the front page. Almost always the first comments in the thread would become the top comments, with no way to sort, and I would always sign my comment with legittorrents.info. Then later I would come back and check the Google Analytics stats to see those sweet sweet traffic spikes."
This is GENIUS. It's a shame signatures are dead now, I kind of liked them when they weren't annoying.
"I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion."
It's funny how often this works out like this. I think you can "make it" in software with either hobby experience or a formal degree, and of the two I think the hobby experience is a lot more likely to make you good at "shipping". But the context you get out of a CS degree is super helpful because it compliments your actual work in a thousand tiny (or big, depending on the topic) ways. (Writing CRUD apps is probably not going to flex your CS degree but if someone asks you to optimize a database query, suddenly that second databases class you took about query planners and db internals is suddenly really helpful context.) But I agree with the sentiment here where having hobby experience on top of your CS degree is rocket fuel for your career.
"I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later."
Compared to how easy it is to be wasteful nowadays, there's still really something to be said for intentionally running things on a shoestring budget. (And sometimes we convince ourselves you practically have to be wasteful... isn't running a $20/mo managed k8s + load balancer setup table stakes nowadays?? and you've got to have a hip new $40/yr TLD and don't forget to factor in that surprise big egress bandwidth bill you're gonna accidentally incur at some point).
Crazy how much you can do with a $5 VPS and an app server, distributed as a package for your OS's package manager, running as a systemd service. Even just adding a container runtime can be a surprising additional amount of complexity.
Super cool trip down memory lane. I remember finding your site eons ago when I was in high school too.
It's cool seeing some of the most popular shows there like Revision3, it reminds me of Digg, Kevin Rose and my favorite online show, thebroken. Really cool period in internet history. Thanks for hosting for so long!
Oh no I just meant wrapping them in an anchor pointing to the source, to be able to click and see full size, instead of right click and open image in new tab. A very, very minor thing.
The second I clicked in here, I immediately remembered your website. (That green theme is very iconic and memorable). When I was a young teenager, I remember visiting your site plenty of times and downloading things off of it. Probably something like Linux ISOs, or music. I was a nerdy kid who really liked the idea of peer to peer stuff, I guess.
I probably tried to contribute some RuneScape-related content, but it likely didn't stay seeded for long haha.
I had spammers uploading torrents in mass for a good while. With auto approval of torrents I spent a lot of time logging in to fight them.
Eventually I found an addon to help bulk remove torrents, but even that was a hassle. Eventually in the later years I turned on email verification, which didn't actually work (I never bothered to figure out why) and if someone really wanted to upload, they would post on the forum to which I would then manually verify them.
I've been helping law enforcement to harvest torrent seeders for the last 10 years. LT is on my list. If there is someone in the world who owns one of the biggest torrent databases, probably it's me
Advice for people wanting to earn money on ads: Don't use adsense. Make a list of companies that might be interested in advertising on your website, then start making calls.
Advertisers have the same problem. Adwords sucks. Facebook ads sucks and are very expensive. There are few alternatives so it's an easy sell.
With the GPT's taking over Google, I wonder when web devs will feel nostalgia about the SEO-days...
> my first exposures to implementing SEO (what I now do for a living), which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead
there's a strong intention against free digital assets.
the logic of the market is imposing itself over the digital realm (the inside of the internet?)
this logic wants us to pay to copy. why should only some get to keep the enormous advantage unlocked by digital information while the rest are forced to pay?
> Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.
Be very cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there's often no remaining options if you lose adsense.