Introducing The Techdirt Insider Discord

from the join-us dept

Join the Insider Discord with a Watercooler or Behind The Curtain membership!

Techdirt has been around for nearly 25 years at this point, and we have an unfortunate habit of being just slightly too far ahead of the technology curve. The site was launched before the word blog even existed, and certainly before there were readily available and easy to use tools for creating a blog (more on that soon!), so we cobbled together our own solution. We've done that with unfortunate frequency. In the early 2000s, we even built our own internal RSS reader in order to find stories (I always thought it was better than Google Reader). And, a while back, we launched the Techdirt "Insider Chat" long before Discord or Slack or other such tools were popular.

The Techdirt Insider Chat was a widget on our site that, if you supported us at certain levels in our own Insider Shop (or on Patreon), you got access to a chat that only those supporters could use -- but which was still displayed on the sidebar for anyone to see. Because there weren't widespread tools to make this possible, we built our own. But it was a bit clunky and limited, and honestly wasn't receiving that much use beyond a handful of dedicated users.

Over the last few months, we've moved the Insider Chat over to Discord, which has become the standard these days for community chats. However, we did want to still include the feature of displaying the chat publicly -- but only allowing actual supporters to participate. So while we are now using Discord as the basis of the chat (which is much easier for many people to use, has many more features, and allows for things like accessing the chat on mobile devices), we built our own embeddable widget that reflects the chat in the sidebar (which you can see if you look over to the right).

If you're interested in (1) supporting Techdirt and (2) joining in on the conversations now happening in the chat and (3) connecting with others in the Techdirt community, please consider supporting us at a level that includes the Insider Chat.

As you'll recall, earlier this year we removed all the ads (and Google tracking code) from Techdirt. We are relying more and more on our community supporting us going forward, and we're working hard to provide those supporters with more useful and fun features, including this new Discord community.

Filed Under: chat, insider chat, techdirt
Companies: discord, techdirt

This Thursday, Watch The Techdirt Podcast Live - And Become A Patreon Backer To Call In With Questions!

from the 300-episodes dept

As you may know, we’re fast approaching our 300th episode of the podcast, and to celebrate we’re bringing back the original co-hosts, Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy, to join Mike Masnick for a special live-streamed episode this Thursday, September 30th at 1pm PT / 4pm ET.

Stay tuned on Thursday morning when we’ll be sharing a link to the YouTube live stream here on the blog and on Twitter. But, for our backers on Patreon, we’re also testing out a new feature that will allow you to call in live and talk to the hosts! If you're already a backer, you can find the link to join via our recording and call-in platform on Patreon in your message inbox and in a backers-only post on our page. If not, now's the time to become a patron and get access to this and other special bonuses! This is the first time we’ve experimented with this feature, so we’re anticipating the possibility of technical issues that prevent it from working — but if all goes well, we’re excited to field your questions and celebrate 300 episodes of The Techdirt Podcast!

Filed Under: live call-ins, live streaming, techdirt podcast
Companies: techdirt

Support Public Code, While Helping Support Techdirt

from the synergy dept

Recently, following our announcement that we have removed all Google ads and tracking code from Techdirt, a reader reached out to us with a novel (and greatly appreciated!) proposal for supporting the change and our ongoing reporting while also helping out a good cause: buying an ad — not for their own benefit, but for that of a public interest campaign that aligns perfectly with our own values. That's why you see a new banner in the sidebar on the site, encouraging our readers to sign an open letter put together by FSFE calling on the EU to pass a law requiring all publicly financed software to be made available under a free and open source license.

This reader purchased the ad with their own money, as a way of helping out both Techdirt and the FSFE campaign — and we think this is such an amazing and generous idea that we wanted to call extra attention to it with a post. We've written about this same issue of open sourcing publicly funded software in the past, when the White House began embracing the idea and then unveiled an official open source software policy — but the fact is it should be the norm for all governments that use taxpayer money to develop software. If the public funds something, it should be available to the public by default.

And, of course, we also want to call attention to this campaign as a way that you can support Techdirt. As we said in our post about removing Google trackers from the site, these kinds of reader-friendly changes also take away some of our revenue streams, and increase our reliance on you, our readers, to support us directly when and if you can. We're extremely grateful to all the readers who stepped up and gave us a tip through our Friend of Techdirt option in the Insider Shop, or engaged with one of the many other ways to support us — and now this one generous reader has showed yet another option, and one that allows you to support Techdirt and the public interest at the same time.

So we encourage everyone to sign the open letter to help demonstrate that this kind of campaign works. Moreover, if there's a campaign or an organization out there that you think aligns well with Techdirt's values and readership and that you'd like to support while helping us out in this way, please get in touch and let us know. We don't currently have fixed rates for direct ad purchases like this, and instead prefer to come up with custom solutions that fit your budget and needs — so don't hesitate to reach out and let us know what you have in mind.

Thanks again to all our readers, and today especially to this one reader who came to us with this excellent idea!

Filed Under: ads, open code, open licensing, open source, publicly financed software
Companies: techdirt

Techdirt Is Now Entirely Without Any Google Ads Or Tracking Code

from the cleaning-out-the-cobwebs dept

First things first: if you are interested in advertising on Techdirt in a non-intrusive, non-obnoxious way, please contact us. We'd love to work with you on cool, innovative advertising and sponsorship that engages, instead of annoys, our community. As some of you may recall, last summer, we had to pull all ads off of Techdirt, after we kept running into problems with Google, and its overly aggressive, overly sensitive (if somewhat arbitrary) advertising morality police (such as telling us all our stories about Google were "dangerous or derogatory").

After announcing that, we had a few different companies approach us with possible alternatives, and earlier this year, we tried to put ads back on the site briefly, with a promise from a provider that they could both serve better quality ads as well as "deal with" Google if it started complaining again. Here's the unfortunate secret underpinning nearly all of the internet advertising space: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies which will purport to put ads on your website. And all of them will promise "quality" ads and better rates. But the unfortunate reality is that they're all just backstopped by Google, and the ads are all the same crappy ads in the end. Only the largest websites (or highly, highly specialized ones) can really pull their own weight on advertising. And, tragically, wonky tech/legal/policy blogs don't cut it (unless we wanted to just start running reviews of every silly tech product out there, and that's not our thing).

So, we worked with a new partner, with promises of higher quality... and it all turned out to just be the same awful Google ads again, and with it, the same automated emails every damn day from Google threatening to cut us off for our "dangerous and derogatory" content. This time around, we just ignored those threats, because at this point, we're so damn sick of it that if Google cuts us off, so be it.

But, there was a larger issue. In our wrapup of the 2020 stats for Techdirt, I mentioned in passing that this would be the last year we used Google Analytics for tracking how people use the site. We've used a few different analytics systems in the life of Techdirt, and I think we used MeasureMap before Google bought it and wrapped it into Google Analytics. And, to be clear, Google Analytics worked decently well, had a nice interface (much nicer than most competitors) and, of course, was free for our use case. But that freedom came with a different kind of price -- which is that Google was tracking users on our site. And that was becoming both more and more problematic, and more of a nuisance.

After becoming increasingly uncomfortable with that, we switched over to a different analytics package, and are now using both Plausible and Matomo (self-hosted), to make sure that we're much more protective of the privacy of Techdirt's readers. We actually pulled Google Analytics off the site in late January. But then we noticed something odd. In February, Google Analytics was still showing up even though we had pulled the tags. It turned out that, via the new ad partner we had, as soon as ads via Google show up on our site Google Analytics code showed up along with it. And that really sucks.

After going through a variety of options, we eventually realized that none of this was worth it. We ended our contract with our ad provider, and then had to scrub through all our code to make sure Google Analytics was truly gone (it's amazing how it pops up in unexpected places). We didn't post about this immediately, in part because we were busy with other stuff, but also because I wanted to make sure Google Analytics was really gone. And it is.

Of course, that also means we're once again without any advertising on Techdirt, which is a hit to our revenue and our ability to keep going -- at a time when that's under threat from other things as well. We are hoping to try some more creative (less intrusive, less annoying) sponsorship and advertising methods in the near future, but at the very least we're increasingly going to rely on you, our community, to help Techdirt stick around. If you are able to, and interested, the easiest way to directly support Techdirt is via the Friend of Techdirt option (basically a way to tip us however much you'd like), but we have a wide variety of ways to support us, and any one you choose is greatly appreciated.

Techdirt is one of the very, very, very few truly independent media brands around. Almost none of the independent media brands that existed when we started remain. Some have been sucked up into larger companies or shut down entirely. Others have decided to go behind expensive paywalls. We've had to adapt and change over the years in many ways just to stick around, but in the end the reason we do this is because of the community we've built up here. For us to stick around, I need to ask the community to help support us as well. We have some cool experiments and projects in the works, so stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, if you can help us out, it would be hugely appreciated.

Filed Under: ads, advertising, analytics, privacy, tracking
Companies: google, techdirt

Our New Monetization Experiment: Coil & The Web Monetization Protocol

from the check-it-out dept

As some of you know there have been no ads on Techdirt for the past few months or so, due to some issues with the way in which Google's AdSense program was run. We've been sorting through some possible options for some better advertising solutions and we may begin some new experiments shortly. In the meantime though, I want to thank everyone who has stepped up to support us in one way or another. I won't deny that losing the revenue from ads sucks, because it does, but we've always relied on a variety of other business models beyond ads as well.

The ad situation has caused a bunch of companies and projects to reach out to us about some other monetization ideas and options. Most of them were... not great. Or they were intrusive or annoying for you. But one that was quite intriguing was the idea of experimenting with Coil. Coil is working on creating an actual standard for web monetization, called the Web Monetization standard. It's being proposed as a W3C standard, and assuming that happens, then it wouldn't even just be connected to Coil any more. There are various ideas that have some similarities to what Coil is doing, but Coil is the only one I know of that is built around a standard that they hope will be adopted more widely and independently of Coil itself. It's also using the Interledger open protocol and you know how I feel about protocols.

So, how does it work? Well, as of last week, Techdirt is now "web monetized" with Coil. If you have a Coil account, which runs you $5/month, and the Coil browser extension, when you browse Techdirt, Coil will automatically deposit money into a wallet for us. It will also do that for a few other sites that are using Coil... including Imgur, Hackernoon and a bunch of Conde Nast sites like Wired (though, bizarrely, not Ars Technica). The more time you spend on Techdirt, the more we get, but it doesn't change how much you pay. And, also, it's not like we're going to try to keep you here any longer than usual.

Being realistic here: we don't expect this to be huge. In fact, we barely expect it to be small. But I still believe in the promise of the early web, built on open protocols and standards. Marc Andreessen, creator of the original graphical web browser and now the successful venture capitalist, has said multiple times that the original sin in creating the browser was the failure to build in monetization. Coil and the various other projects appear to be an attempt to rectify that -- and to me, that's worth supporting and experimenting with. I don't know where it will go, but if we can somehow help make it more widely adopted (and get a bit of support back in exchange) that seems like a good thing.

We're also brainstorming some other ideas around how we might use Coil in fun ways, so feel free to make some suggestions in the comments as well if you have any creative ideas. If you want to test it out, head on over to Coil and sign up. And let us know what you think.

Filed Under: ads, business models, open protocols, techdirt, web monetization
Companies: coil, techdirt

My Comment To The FCC Regarding The Ridiculous NTIA Petition To Reinterpret Section 230

from the what-nonsense dept

Today is the due date for the first round of submissions to the FCC's comment period on the NTIA's laughable petition, which asks the agency to reinterpret Section 230 in response to the President's temper tantrum about Twitter fact checking him. This is clearly outside of its regulatory authority, but it has caved and pandered to the President by calling for comments anyway.

There are a ton of individuals and organizations commenting on why nearly everything around this is unconstitutional and/or outside the FCC's legal authority. The Copia Institute is filing a comment along those lines written by Cathy Gellis, and she'll have a post about that later. However, I wanted to file a separate comment from my own personal perspective about Section 230 and the nature of running a small media website that relies heavily on its protections. Because beyond the various filings from lawyers about this or that specific aspect of the law or Constitutional authority, it appeared that there was little discussion of just how illiterate the NTIA petition is concerning how content moderation works. And, tragically, many of the early filers on the docket were people who were screaming that because some content of theirs had been moderated by a social media company, the FCC must neuter Section 230.

The key part of my comment is to reinforce the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well and you will always have some people who disagree with the results, and there will also be many "mistakes" because that's the nature of content moderation. It is not evidence of bias or censorship. And, indeed, as my comment highlights, changing Section 230 to try to deal with these fake problems is only likely to lead to the suppression of more speech and the shrinking of the open internet.

Also, I talk about the time I wasn't kicked out of a lunch where I sat next to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

You can read my entire comment below.

If you would like to file a comment on the proceedings and have not yet done so, while the initial round of comments is due today, there is a second round for "responding" to comments made in the first round, which runs through September 17th.

Filed Under: ajit pai, cda 230, content moderation, fcc, impossibility, ntia, section 230
Companies: techdirt

Why Are There Currently No Ads On Techdirt? Apparently Google Thinks We're Dangerous

from the content-moderation-at-scale dept

You probably didn't notice it, but there are currently no third-party ads on Techdirt. We pulled them down late last week, after it became impossible to keep them on the site, thanks to some content moderation choices by Google. In some ways, this is yet another example of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. If we didn't know and understand how impossible content moderation at scale is to do well, we might be like The Federalist and pretend that Google's content moderation decisions were based on disagreement with our ideology. That would have allowed us to make a fake story like the one that is still getting news cycles, thanks to idiots in Congress insisting that Google defunded the Federalist because of its ideological viewpoints.

The truth is that Google's AdSense (its third-party ad platform) content moderation just sucks. In those earlier posts about The Federalist's situation, we mentioned that tons of websites deal with those "policy violation" notices from Google all the time. Two weeks ago, it went into overdrive for us: we started receiving policy violation notices at least once a day, and frequently multiple times per day. Every time, the message was the same, telling us we had violated their policies (they don't say which ones) and we had to log in to our "AdSense Policy Center" to find out what the problem was. Every day for the ensuing week and a half (until we pulled the ads down), we would get more of these notices, and every time we'd log in to the Policy Center, we'd get an ever rotating list of "violations." But there was never much info to explain what the violation was. Sometimes it was "URL not found" (which seems to say more about AdSense's shit crawler than us). Sometimes it was "dangerous and derogatory content." Sometimes it was "shocking content."

But that would be about it. One difference, however, was that in the past Google would say that we didn't need to fix those flagged URLs and that they would just stop showing ads on those pages. Which is fine. They don't want their ads appearing there, no problem. But, many of these new "policy violations" said they were "must fix" issues. But what that "fix" sould be was never explained. Incredibly, this included a non-existent URL (a malformed URL that would just take you to the front page of Techdirt). That was deemed "must fix." Also, somewhat amusingly, the tag page for Google was deemed "dangerous or derogatory" and "must fix":

Same with the tag page for "content moderation." I only wish I were joking:

Again, what you see there was basically all of the information given to us. How do we "fix" that? Who the fuck knows? Again, I do not think that this is Google targeting us for our views (even when we have been critical of Google or Google's content moderation practices). It just seems to be that content moderation is impossible to do well, and Google is a prime example.

Incredibly, this list of problematic URLs would just keep changing. Some would drop off the list with no explanation (even the "must fix" ones). Some new ones would be added. Some would switch between "must fix" and "don't need to fix." No explanation. No record of the "fixes." As an example, on Friday July 31st, I logged in and saw 25 URLs deemed to be policy violations. On Saturday morning I logged in and it was down to 18. No reason. Sunday morning it was at 22. But Sunday evening it was 27.

I tried to reach out to people at AdSense to figure out what the hell we should do and did not get back anything useful.

Three other things happened around this time as well. First, on the same day we started receiving these daily (or multiple times daily) policy violation emails, Google also started claiming that our daily emails (which are just snapshots of the blog itself) were phishing attempts, and automatically deleting them from any G Suite user's email account:

For users of Gmail (not G Suite) it just moved our newsletters to spam, still claiming they were phishing attempts:

Again, the emails don't ask users to do anything or to log in to anything. They're not phishing. They're just an email version of the day's blog posts. We didn't see how these two things (the AdSense violations and the accusations of "phishing") could possibly be connected, so it might just be a coincidence that they started the exact same day -- but, again, who knows?

The next thing that happened was that the company we work with to manage the ad flow on our website (and to bring in other sources, beyond Google ads) told us that Google had reached out to them (not us) to say that because of all of the ongoing unfixed "policy" violations, we would be kicked out of AdSense by the end of August. Also, Google told them that we were engaging in "clickspam" by hiding our ads to make them look like regular content, and that needed to be fixed immediately. The problem is -- we don't do that and have never done that. Our ads were always in the right hand column and clearly called out as ads. Indeed, we pay attention to what other sites do, and we are way, way, way, way more careful than basically every other website on the planet when it comes to not shoving our ads where they might be mistaken as organic content.

Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on. And, to be honest, that's the last straw for us. We would try to work with Google to understand why our content is so problematic for it, but when Google's products start harming our users and causing a nuisance for them, that's when they've got to go.

Given all this, we just decided that we're pulling the ads off the site entirely for the time being -- at least until we can figure out a better situation. This (obviously) represents a revenue hit for us, but the situation had become impossible to deal with. I was wasting so much time the past few weeks trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do, as opposed to doing the work I needed to be doing. So, that's it for now. We're looking at other providers out there, but so far, so many of the ones we talk to appear to be sketchy, and we're not doing that either. If anyone knows of any non-sketchy, non-awful advertising partners, please let us know. Or, if you happen to have some excess money and want to just sponsor stuff so we don't even have to worry about regular ads, let us know. Assuming most of you are not in that position, we do have a page of various ways individuals can support us. We know that times are tough for many, many people right now, but if you happen to be doing okay, and can help us replace at least a little of what money we made from ads, that would be greatly appreciated.

Filed Under: ads, adsense, business models, content moderation, dangerous, dangerous and derogatory, techdirt
Companies: google, techdirt

Yes, This Site Uses Cookies, Because Nearly All Sites Use Cookies, And We're Notifying You Because We're Told We Have To

from the even-though-it's-silly dept

If you're visiting our site today (and I guess, forever into the future if you don't click "got it") you will now see a notification at the bottom of the site saying that this site uses cookies. Of course, this site uses cookies. Basically any site uses cookies for all sorts of useful non-awful, non-invasive purposes. We use cookies, for example, to track your preferences (including when you turn off ads on the site, which we let you do for free). In order to make sure those ads are gone, or whatever other preferences stay in place, we use cookies.

For the last few years, of course, you've probably seen a bunch of sites pop up boxes "notifying" you that they use cookies. For the most part, this has to do with various completely pointless EU laws and regulations that probably make regulators feel good, but do literally nothing to protect your privacy. Worst are the ones that suggest that by continuing on the site you've made some sort of legal agreement with the site (come on...). These cookie notification pop ups do not help anyone. They don't provide you particularly useful information, and they don't lead you to a place that is more protective of your actual privacy. They just annoy people, and so people ignore them, leave the site, or (most commonly) just "click ok" to get the annoying bar or box out of the way to get to the content they wanted to see in the first place.

Here's the stupendously stupid thing about all of this: you are already in control. If you don't like cookies, your browser gives you quite a lot of control over which ones you keep, and how (and how often) you get rid of them. Some browsers, like Mozilla's Firefox Focus browser, automatically discard cookies as soon as you close a page (it's great for mobile browsing, by the way). Of course, that leads to some issues if you want to remain logged in on certain pages, or to have them remember preferences, but for those you can use a different browser or change various settings. It's nice that the power to handle cookies is very much up to you. We here at Techdirt like it when the control is pushed out to the ends of the network, rather than controlled in the middle.

But, because it makes some privacy regulators feel like they've "done something", they require such a pointless "cookie notification" on sites. Recently, one of our ad providers told us that we, too, needed to include such a cookie notification, or else we'd lose the ability to serve any ads from Google, who (for better or for worse) is one of the major ad providers out there. We did not get a clear explanation for why we absolutely needed to add this annoying notification that doesn't really help anyone, but the pleas were getting more and more desperate, with all sorts of warnings. We even asked if we could just turn off the ads entirely (which would, of course, represent something of a financial hit) and they seemed to indicate that because we still use other types of cookies (again, including cookies to say "don't show this person any ads"), we had to put up the notification anyway.

The last thing we were told is that if we didn't put up a cookie notification within a day, Google would "block us globally." I'm honestly not even sure what this means. But, either way, we're now showing you a cookie notification. It's silly and annoying and I don't think it serves your interests at all. It serves our interests only inasmuch as it gets our partner to stop bugging us. Don't you feel better?

You can click "got it" and make it go away. You can not click it and it will stay. You can block cookies in your browser, or you can leave them. You can toss out your cookies every day or every week (not necessarily a bad practice sometimes). You're in control. But we have to show you the notification, and so we are.

Filed Under: advertising, control, cookie notification, cookies, eu, preferences, privacy, privacy theater, silly pointless regulations, silly regulations
Companies: techdirt

Teespring Takes Down Our Copying Is Not Theft Gear, Refuses To Say Why

from the so-now-it's-on-threadless dept

At Techdirt we're no strangers to people disagreeing — often, let's say, vehemently — with our views on copyright. But I've still often been surprised by how angry some people get about the simple, factual observation that copying is not theft. We've made the point many times (and it remains true even if you think copyright infringement is a dastardly crime), and a few years ago we put it on a t-shirt and some other products via the print-on-demand platform Teespring, where we sell a bunch of gear. But you won't find the shirt at those links anymore, because last week we received notice from Teespring that it had been taken down... supposedly for copyright infringement.

At first, it seemed like this was likely a simple error from an automated system (the takedown notification explained that it was not based on a complaint from a third party) and I suspected we had been caught up in Teespring's response to an unrelated (and amusing) phenomenon that was taking place at the same time: a bunch of artists and others online were aiming to prove that there are bots out there copying artwork from social media and selling it on print-on-demand sites, by spreading funny and extremely-infringing images which did, indeed, show up on several print-on-demand t-shirts soon afterwards.

It would hardly be surprising if this spurred print-on-demand services into a not-too-discerning copyright sweep of existing products that the Copying Is Not Theft gear somehow got caught up in. As we are constantly pointing out, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. I figured that a quick email to the "IP Escalations" address offered in the takedown notification, clarifying that the design does not in fact include any "third-party content" as the notification claimed, would get it reinstated. But to my surprise, they responded that they could not reinstate the campaign because it violates Teespring's Acceptable Use Policies. One of the six policies is about intellectual property — explicitly the problem according to the initial notification email — but they offered no response to my claim that the content was entirely original, and it seemed they were backing down from the IP angle and just going for a vague response of "it violates one of these five other rules". Since it certainly contains no nudity, hate speech, or violence, I can only assume they believe it either "promotes illegal activity" or (less likely given the definitions on their policy page) contains "false or misleading claims".

Unfortunately all I can do is guess, because it seems like they really don't like being asked for an explanation. Upon first asking what policy we violated, I got a reply simply linking to the same policy page with no additional information. I clarified that I'd read the page, that we were not in violation of any of the policies, and asked which of the six in the list was the issue. It was at this point their true feelings started to peek through the mandatory please-and-thanks language of customer service:

We apologize if you disagree with our decision and for any inconvenience this matter has caused. Please understand that we are not in a position to debate our policies or discuss this issue further; however, your feedback has been noted and we truly appreciate your time today.

Sincerely,
Team Teespring

I told them I wasn't seeking a debate, and just wanted to know what policy we violated, and...

You've been advised three times that the content has violated our acceptable use policy. You have been provided with the links to this policy for further information. This policy and choice to remove the content are not up for discussion. We apologize if you disagree with the decision. You will not receive anymore communication from us on this matter.

Thank you,
Team Teespring

And so apparently that's that. I enjoy the sleight-of-hand in claiming that a list of six policies is an answer to my question of which specific policy we violated (and the sudden switch in their language from plural to singular when I emphasized this question), and the fact that the "IP Escalations" department we were specifically told to contact if we believed the takedown was in error considers this "not up for discussion". It seems most likely that someone at Teespring believes the phrase "copying is not theft" is promoting illegal acts, when in fact its purpose is to emphasize an important legal (and ethical, and practical) distinction that should be obvious but that a surprising number of people casually ignore or actively oppose — and, as noted, it remains important even if you are a supporter of strong copyright laws.

Of course, Teespring is free to take down our stuff without an explanation or even a reason if it wants, and it doesn't have to offer an escalation contact at all, let alone a helpful one. And if it's true there was some sort of sweep going on and lots of people were contesting takedowns, we may still have simply been victims of sheer scale — though the unhelpful emails still make it clear that the decision was examined and confirmed by an actual human, so I'm still quite curious about the official rationale. But since it's "not up for discussion," the more important conclusion here is that it's time to start exploring alternatives to Teespring for our various lines of Techdirt gear.

So today we're relaunching the Copying Is Not Theft gear in our new store on Threadless.

For now we're just testing the waters with this new platform — the product lines and pricing are a bit different, which means some options are gone (no stickers for now) but we're also able to add some cool new ones, including notebooks, phone cases, buttons, bags and more!

If all goes well, we may consider moving all our designs over to the Threadless store, or we may end up exploring some other options in the future. For now, get yourself some gear and remember: Copying Is Not Theft!

Filed Under: content moderation, copying is not theft, copyright, policies, violating policies
Companies: techdirt, teespring

Bad Ads We Won't Bombard You With And Other Ways To Support Techdirt

from the thanks-for-your-support dept

Check out our new list of all the ways you can support Techdirt »

Let's get a few things out of the way first: we are rarely aggressive in asking for support on Techdirt. Many other sites do complete takeovers or popups or have pleas for funding that take up half the screen. We don't do that. However, every so often we do remind folks that we need support to keep running -- so today I'm going to do that with what is hopefully an interesting story and a discussion on the kinds of things we won't do for money.

If you haven't yet heard it, I want to recommend a recent episode of the Reply All podcast entitled An Ad for the Worst Day of Your Life. It is quite an amazing story involving a guy whose wife died suddenly and unexpectedly a day after their daughter was born. That happened back in 2008, and the guy, Matt, was quite understandably distraught. He began blogging about his life as a widower and single father. The blog caught on and got more and more attention. Eventually, Matt decided the blog was no longer necessary, pulled it down, and moved on with his life.

Then, this year, just as he was about to get remarried, he suddenly started seeing ads with a giant picture of him -- and his dead wife. Those ads were showing up everywhere, thanks to the various sites that include awful units full of "Stories From Around the Web" or "Stuff You May Have Missed" or whatever. You know what they look like. They're always filled with the worst kind of clickbait crap imaginable. "Whatever happened to..." "Eat this if you want to live longer..." That kind of stuff. Here, I just randomly opened up a story on Google News, scrolled to the bottom and got this example:

They're all over the damn place -- and many publishers love them, because they pay a lot more than just about any other ads. The Reply All episode calls these "Chumboxes" -- a term I'd not heard before -- and then goes through the process of figuring out how Matt's picture kept showing up in them. It's convoluted, but involves content farms playing a weird arbitrage game of writing clickbait stories and then trying to attract traffic to sell their own ads. A story about a dead wife gets clicks. And that generates more fake stories about Matt and his wife and more ads and more clicks. It's a huge mess of crap, but it pays incredibly well.

The two major companies who provide these things are Outbrain and Taboola. And they're big. There are a few other smaller operations, but Outbrain and Taboola are the main ones. Outbrain has raised nearly $200 million and bought up many of its smaller competitors. Taboola has raised $160 million.

Here's the thing: Taboola, specifically, has been after us to put these ads on our site for years. We told them no, and they kept coming back. We told them no again and explained that we think those ads are crap and are an insult to our readers (because they are). And the company said, "No, we have quality filters and we promise it'll show good ads." Eventually we said we'd take a look and ran a test with our content using their "quality filters." And, guess what? The ads were still awful crap that would be insulting to you. So we told Taboola no. But they don't let up. Every few weeks we get another request from Taboola. They email. They try to friend us on Linkedin. They try to friend us on Facebook. And we keep saying no.

Because, despite what some trolls will say about us doing anything that will get clicks or money, we have no desire for short term revenue that fucks over our community. Because we actually value you guys (even some of our critics). Using crappy services like Taboola and Outbrain shows a lack of trust and lack of respect for your community. It shows a level of short-term money-grab thinking that is insulting and disrespectful. And that's too bad, because the concept behind Taboola and Outbrain could be good. If we could use a service like that which would actually take you to good and relevant information around the web, and get us paid at the same time, that would be great. Indeed, seven or eight years ago we partnered with a company that promised that. And then, a month later, they said they were no longer doing that and wanted us to do sketchy stuff. And we no longer work with that company.

We've talked before about how traditional banner ads -- the kinds from Google AdSense, for example -- have become next to useless over the last few years. The rates keep dropping to the point that they're barely worth including at all. In fact, we're exploring some new advertising programs that respect our community by not including any tracking technology at all, so if you happen to work for a company that wants to advertise in a respectful manner, please contact us.

All of that is to say: we try to respect the community here, even at the expense of revenue. And that sometimes makes things quite difficult. So we need to rely on you, our community, more and more. We try to be as respectful as possible. We don't put up paywalls. We don't complain if you use ad blockers. Hell, we let you turn off the ads on the site. But we also sometimes need to ask for support, and we've tried to make it possible to support us in many, many, different ways. We've now put up a page that lists out all the ways you can support us, from becoming an Insider (the easiest and most direct way to support us -- and we're working on some fun updates to that program), to backing us on Patreon, to buying one of our many t-shirt designs (more coming soon) to buying products from our deals store, from which receive a commission. We also have a partnership with Private Internet Access if you're looking for a VPN.

We're also just now launching a new job board in partnership with ZipRecruiter, and if you're looking to hire someone and post a job there, it helps support us as well (also, if you're looking for a tech job, go check it out).

Our goal, as always, is to build and support this community -- but it does take some money to keep things going. We know that not everyone can support us monetarily and we do our absolute best to make the site and community work for everyone, without being annoying or intrusive. But that does mean that every once in a while we may need to remind you that we need your support and explain the way we think about these things.

Filed Under: bad ads, fans, insider, native advertising, support
Companies: outbrain, taboola, techdirt