Oh...you mean the 'C-x M-c M-supernova' command shortcut in Emacs, right?

This sounds like a plot straight out of one of my cyberpunk/shadowrun gaming sessions. Speaking of which, it's been a while since I've played Uplink.

IRL! IRL! IRL!

irl: "It's Showtime!"

Hell, a drone doesn't even have to have a receiver. Especially one that's going to be used as a disposable delivery device. Give it an explosive payload, program in GPS coordinates as a target, launch it and let it pilot itself to the target location. Poor Man's automated cruise missile.

Why do you say it has to be for free? If I'm running a site as a hobby or to showcase my hobby, the cost of running that site would be part of the cost of the hobby. If I can't afford to showcase it that way - whatever the associated costs for operating are - and still do my own hobby, I don't need to be on the web.

The same goes for selling a product or service on the web. If my product isn't bringing in enough where I can pay for the costs of the server, domain name, and someone to put the site together for me (if I don't do it myself), then I'm not ready for the web and shouldn't be there, yet. Simple. The only reason for me to have ads displaying on my site is if I want to give a friend or direct affiliate exposure.

These rotating ads where you just run a script for an ad hosting service and you have no idea what the real ad source is...they need to die a fiery death and there's no legitimate excuse for their existence.

You probably could have gotten away with organizing under a 501c7 and set up a donation link on your site. You wouldn't be directly charging your users for access (as was against your agreement), you'd be giving your user-base a way to assist you with the operational costs of the site. If enough of your users found a substantial enough value in what your site offered, you would have been paid, even if you had to periodically send out help requests.

You could also have taken advantage of affiliate programs as I once did and display those links. I found that they quite often managed to get around AdBlock simply because they were generally static images or gifs located locally with a href pointed straight to an affiliate page on that remote site. The site would operate exactly as if the user went to the remote site's main URL, but depending on the affiliate agreement they had, you'd get paid a few cents for the user making the initial click, and if they bought anything through your affiliate link, they'd cut you a check for a small percentage of what that user spent

The community site I had back then made more than enough to cover monthly and yearly hosting costs using the affiliate method, though I concede that at its most popular I didn't have nor need more than 4 servers (one DB server, 3 redundant web servers) behind the domain. I also didn't have to go the 501c7 route since the site wasn't considered large enough to be more than a hobby. The site and community collapsed more for political reasons than financial (several of us got tired of the bullshit from trolls and felt it better to disband entirely).

Hindsight is 20/20, but there were ways you could have made money to support the site without necessarily resorting to ads that Adblock would have been able to block.

So in your experiment we'd have either inane stuff that people would put up as part of their side hobby and funded by their day job, or sites that make money directly by showcasing the site owner's product or service without hosting intrusive ads from 3rd parties, and the only "advertising" would be what I would directly and knowingly subject myself to by going to the URL or clicking a direct link in a search engine? I can live with that.

Which, for the very large portion of us on firewalled connections (Work, school, etc), was useless anyway. Congratulations, your lack of communication skills and attempt at using an external image to convey it meant that a good portion of your audience has no idea what you were trying to say. May as well have said nothing at all and we'd have just as much understanding of your position on the matter as we do right now anyway. Hence MechaStreisand's statement that "[image link posts are] idiotic here."

See you in 8 minutes... Or maybe I won't.

Wanna play a game? Find me a site where you think advertising is the only way and I'll tell you whether it could find a better way to monetize the info it has, should be a side site for a hobby, or if the example is good enough, I'll concede the point.

When I've run my sites in the past, I've never put a single banner on that page that wasn't my own... except for a single page that was specifically built just to allow access for my users to make use of my affiliate programs. That one page had one affiliate block each for Amazon, DigiKey, NewEgg, and TigerDirect. The rest of the page was banner links to friends' pages where they were selling their own products or services. I made dick on running that entire ad page (maybe 60 cents over the course of that 2 year run), and I never expected to make any money off of it. It was only there as a side service to customers that were already cruising the rest my site for my products/information. My direct revenue at that time was only ever from whatever product or service I was using that site to sell, not advertisements from 3rd party sources. If I was running a blog on a page of the site, I wasn't making money off of it. That was just a way to put my own opinions out there. If you went there, read through it, maybe left a comment... great. Not once on that page were you going to be subjected to any kind of advertising. The #1 compliment that my customers and site visitors gave me on the site design? It was a refreshing break from the rest of what they had to deal with on the web. Simple, sleek, great use of colors, and the fastest loading pages that they've ever seen since the inception of the commercialized web.

If you are a large syndicated news site, charge a subscription fee. That's fine with me. If I like a sampling of your articles, I'll probably pay for a subscription. If enough people feel you're worth the subscription fee...great, you get to live. If you're Joe Sixpack running a personal blog and putting your opinions out there with a ton of clickbait ads all over your page... Guess what; opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one and every single one stinks. You want to support yourself by putting yet another source of near useless information out there and rely on that for your only bit of income? You deserve to flounder when no one clicks your ads, blocks the ads, or just doesn't visit your site after the first go. If you're not truly insightful, you're offering nothing for society. If you were truly insightful, you'd be able to put your money where your mouth is and make something of all those wonderful ideas you have, and use that to make your money on...instead of bombarding me with garbage ads for enlarging my dick or what ever one neat trick pony they put up on your piece of shit site.

Basically it comes down to this: do something useful that I'm willing to buy into? I'll go to your site and buy all day. Use your blog to bullshit me like a damn street hawker and then flash all kinds of ads in my face? Fuck you, goodbye. I listen to enough bullshit all day, I don't need yours too.

Yes... yes he could have. And the trouble with "things could always be worse"? Making things worse is so much easier than putting effort into making things truly better.

Never. Ever. Do. That. Again.
Or I will mark you as a troll if I have mod points. And frankly, I hope somebody does that to this one.

If you're going to post an informative link from Wikipedia, go straight to Wikipedia; not that wikiwand crap. Using that link to a site pushing a formatting extension that changes the way wikipedia's UI format looks is trolling for users to hijack with a MitM attack. This is fucking /. The general population knows better than to install random extensions from unverified sources. Go pedal your crapware on reddit.