Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-contributor <comment><USER3> I've been a contributor member for several months now, because I firmly believe in two things:

1\. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2\. Life without ads is much better.

So here's what people need to know about Google contributor:

1\. I pay for the highest level available.

2\. I love not seeing ads.

3\. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common, but are neither the majority of advertising online, nor are they among the more annoying.

4\. Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad _space_ is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."

For example, here's a screenshot of iMore (the site that was used to compare ios9's ad blockers): [https://austen- screenshots.s3.amazonaws.com/iMore__The_1_sit...](https://austen- screenshots.s3.amazonaws.com/iMore__The_1_site_for_iPhone_iPad_Mac_and_all_things_Apple_cllk8.png) I'd almost prefer ads.

5\. This doesn't stop most of your pages from taking forever to load because of JavaScript from other ad networks.

6\. I don't care about the tracking/privacy as much as some people, but it doesn't solve that problem either.

So, do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely. I hope Google can expand it, and I _will_ pay. I have no idea how expensive it would be to pay for the disappearance of all ads, but I'd likely do it. (I recognize I'm not the "average" Internet user as far as what I'm willing to pay).

That being said, it does not yet come close to competing with the convenience that an ad-blocker provides (which I don't use out of principle).

It's still early, so I give some leeway, and I like the idea, but as of yet this won't be a game changer. I truly hope it can become one.

<comment><USER4> > or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist

I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.

Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is that they have to get their pagerank up and stay relevant. The reason they have to do that is because if they don't do it, there are ad revenue dependent content generators out there that will do it for them. If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

Google is great. I think in many ways they've made the world a better place. Google is very ad revenue dependent. Ad revenue sponsored all of the great television shows and radio shows from the beginning. I don't think that advertising should go away because it makes great things by Google and media companies possible.

However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.

<comment><USER5> > I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.

I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.

Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and _good_ content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.

Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.

And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.

<comment><USER6> Many of us liked the Internet in 1996 ;) And some saw its commercialization as an affront, as a violation of fundamental principles. So anyway, I'm not at all attached to the Internet existing in it's current form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find these things interesting, but not so much I won't use an adblocker. Perhaps I can buy into this and allow google ads, and then block the resulting 'thanks' text. I don't need that either.

I find the whole thing odd though.

I never click ads when I do see them, I literally have never, ever bought anything through advertising links. Even without an adblocker, the only reason the site would be getting money from my view is that the advertiser is being ripped off - I am literally a worthless view to them. In fact for any ad that's beyond static text I am more likely to remember your brand and deliberately _not_ buy your stuff in future.

So effectively, any site that was being supported by my visits would be scamming the advertiser.

I'm kind of OK with that, but the other benefits of adblocking (no tracking, no random scripts executing, much faster page-loading etc) far outweigh any concerns.

I know, I'm accessing your content without paying at the moment. I would be happy to put a header in my http requests that says I will not render ads, and allow you to decide if you want to serve me. Until then, I'm going to carry on freeloading, but make no mistake - if I wasn't, you would be.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty tired of one of these personalities that appear to be a loud voice in the ad blocking conversation.

"Ad's don't work on me and I have never ever been positively influenced in any way every by one"

This simply makes you, at best, look naive in your believe that your conscious self is responsible for all (or even a majority) of your actions, and at worst, wrong/lying (who remembers everything they've ever purchased and how they came to know about it?)

<comment><USER9> For people that dislike ads the statement, "I have never ever been positively influenced in any way every by one" is literally a definition because if you purchase anything because of an ad you've been made worse off.

If you were going to buy it anyway then the ad did nothing, if you weren't then you are now worse off as you bought something you wouldn't have otherwise -- you've been manipulated.

From this there is no such thing as a positive ad.

Also, he didn't say that ads don't work on him, they certainly do but they're not having the desired effect which makes them worthless to the advertiser. Sure, they get brand recognition but if you consciously make an effort to avoid brands which advertise to you and recommend that others avoid the brand too then you've actually cost the advertiser money, making the ad worthless.

<comment><USER10> But what if you weren't going to buy it because you were not aware it existed? When you see an ad for an interesting movie and decide to check it out, you go watch it, and love it, are you really worse off? Maybe you see an ad for a new restaurant and decide to check it out. Are you worse off? Aren't these examples of positive ads?

<comment><USER11> What if you see the ad, and decide to check the movie out, and it's terrible - a waste of your time and money? What if you see a slick ad for a restaurant, and it turns out the restaurant spends more money on ads than on being a good restaurant, and it is a waste of money? Are you better off?

<comment><USER12> Wow. He was saying they could be positive. Of course you can come up with a counter-example...

<comment><USER11> Which is why it is ridiculous to approach the situation from a "what if..." perspective. We should approach it from net expected benefit, else everyone gets to pretend they are the one true purveyor of good and classy ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is fascinating. Business model: annoy people so much that they pay you to stop annoying them.

Everybody's been talking about the death of display ads, and it looks like Google's paying attention and trying to figure out how to marginalize the ad itself, but still take money on the transaction.

Eventually, Google could probably marginalize the ad so much that there are only a rare few display ads left online, and Google has cleverly tricked us into keeping that industry aloft, essentially paying to keep something we hate alive.

<comment><USER14> The ads aren't there purely to annoy people, they're there to support the content you'd otherwise pay for. The idea of paying them instead of getting ads is also a way to support that content.

<comment><USER15> It can also be seen as acting like the mob. "It'd be a shame if your nice clean web page suddenly got ruined with ads. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price." No thanks. I'll continue to block ads and not be tracked and have my internet load faster.

<comment><USER16> Go for it, but you're only able to have your cake and eat it too because of people who view ads. If I were you, I'd keep quiet and encourage others to view ads, otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls.

<comment><USER17> ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so. For actual money to flow, people need to click on ads. For the advertisers to want to spend money, people need to not just click on the ads but also convert (aka, go to the site and order something).

Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.

What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.

<comment><USER18> >ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so.

Care to back that up with some proof. Cuz I have a pretty clear picture of ad spending and this is not true at all.

<comment><USER17> A clearer way to write this would be, pay-per-impression stopped being the default (or only) way of doing business sometime between 1999-2001. After a brief period where ads were predominantly text-based, ad inflation brought graphical ads and CPM back and nowadays can do CPC as well as CPM or CPA (cost per acquisition) links: [https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472725?hl=en&ref_...](https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472725?hl=en&ref_topic=3119128&vid=1-635787131877473648-2975608647)

But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.

<comment><USER18> Practically all of the advertising on the internet is purchased on per impression basis. It falls into 2 categories:

1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.

2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.

This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.

I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...

<comment><USER19> Your entire post was informative right up the last line, You'd demonstrated your point brilliantly then wrecked it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been using Contributor for the last month or so:

1) One needn't turn on all third-party cookies to make it work. Enabling a subset of

      [*.]doubleclick.com, [*.]doubleclick.net, and [*.]google.com

is sufficient.

2) Contributor is the best existing solution to the third-party micropayment problem I've yet encountered. Direct contributions to sites are surely preferable, but not yet practical. Contributor would appear to have the following structural shortcomings:

\- It only applies to Google's ad network. Mass adoption of Contributor would have the knock-on effect of strengthening Google's advertising position. Whether Google will remain a benevolent ad-network for life is uncertain.

\- It installs a third party as a middleman, when only agreed-upon social and networking protocols are truly requisite. If Contributor were to take off, we run the risk of paying rent to Google for web-view transactions, just as we do with credit-card firms for financial transactions today.

That said, Contributor is a practical step forward in allowing us to underwrite sites we like and to raise the minimum bid that advertisers must pay to get our attention.

Thanks, Contributor team, for making this possible.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the rational reply. Some of the cynical and critical comments here strike me as far too idealistic. This seems like a completely reasonable step to take in offering websites money for ad-free content without having to subscribe to individual content.

The privacy argument, I can easier get on board with. Why does Google need to still track you if you're not seeing ads? Wasn't the point of ad tracking to get you more relevant ads, help advertisers with remarketing, etc. ?

<comment><USER22> They need to track you to associate your contributor account with your browsing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see a couple of issues with programs like this.

First, if this were to take off it would move the industry to impression based pricing wholesale. Reprinted content is already on of the biggest problems today, and with this model there is obvious risk that original creators get nothing as reprinters take everything.

Second, given that we can't have a monopoly on this business, a webmaster is incentivized to join every Contributor-like program there is. We would end up with every website loading hundreds of javascripts for tracking visits from every provider there is, which would massively increase load times on the web.

Third, there are also incentives to game the system by splitting your content over many web sites, using iframes or javascript, each making a call to every possible provider. Similar ad fraud schemes are already a problem today and this will only make them easier.

One easy fix would be to make a system opt-in for the end user on a site-by- site basis. This is similar to how Flattr and Patreon works. I pay to both of them, and will probably not join Contributor, but it will be very exciting to see where Google is taking this.

<comment><USER24> To my knowledge, Contributor uses the same infrastructure and technology as ads, but with a different payload. All 3 problems you mentioned are problems being experienced today:

1\. Google is already able to guage 'low quality' pages, co temt farms and pirates. This doesn't change

2\. This happenens with ads, Google can add a rule saying you "can't have x amount of ads of you want to be on our network "

3.Likely to stay the same: I don't see how contributor makes fraud easier

<comment><USER23> Absolutely, those are problem we know exist and this model risks making worse. The basic arguments is the big move towards cost by impressions if this catches on and becomes a dominant model, and the fact that banners of limited visibility is easier to stack. Huge white, or even invisible, banners littering the page will not disturb the casual user.

Google lost the fight on content farms several years ago. You are more likely to find reprints than original material if you google a breaking story or meme for example, even if there are exceptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has someone tried out to give his own view?

It feels it doesn't address the other reasons people use ad blocking:

\- Fewer HTTP requests (Still have to do all the ad network requests)

\- Less tracking

\- Less CPU/RAM usage (Even if there is no render of ads, still have to process the JS from ad networks)

<comment><USER26> This is why I won't be using this.

I don't want ten different ad network javascripts being loaded and running on every single page, along with whatever assets they want to load up and all the tracking they do across websites.

And tracking is a huge one. This is no longer just a question of whether I'm supporting the site I visit. Whatever your site has to offer is __not __worth the all-encompassing tracking that the networks are doing. If it is, you 'll have a subscription fee I can pay and your service will be valuable enough that I'll pay it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The biggest problem of this is that it only works on Google's ads, but there are far more obnoxious ads that will result in the user wanting and installing an adblocker anyway, and then why bother with Contributor?

<comment><USER28> Most users tend to complain about flying, pop ups, auto playing audio/video. Google does none of that. So is there a real benefit here?

<comment><USER29> Some would say that there are a number of auto-playing audio and app store redirect ads on Doubleclick AdExchange.

<comment><USER30> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#/media/File:Weasel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#/media/File:Weasel_words.svg)

Either they do or they don't. A quick google didn't turn anything up, but does someone have a reputable source?

<comment><USER29> I was trying to be polite, not weasly.

[https://blog.malwarebytes.org/malvertising-2/2014/09/googles...](https://blog.malwarebytes.org/malvertising-2/2014/09/googles- doubleclick-ad-network-abused-once-again-in-malvertising-attacks/)

[http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/247982/google-...](http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/247982/google- doubleclick-network-hit-with-more-malvertis.html)

[http://www.csoonline.com/article/2924309/malware- cybercrime/...](http://www.csoonline.com/article/2924309/malware- cybercrime/advertisers-need-to-start-monitoring-ad-security.html)

[http://readwrite.com/2014/05/15/app-redirects-mobile-spam- ad...](http://readwrite.com/2014/05/15/app-redirects-mobile-spam-ads)

<comment><USER30> Ah sorry, I misread your tone then.

As far as I'm concerned, no need to be polite with Doubleclick. If they're serving malware, they can fuck right off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In terms of generating-revenue-without-running-ads, I do think Patreon is still a better option, as it both provides a _consistent_ , nonseasonal revenue source for the author and content guarantees for the user; a win-win in both cases.

Google Contributor is more of a charitable option which might be too subtle.

<comment><USER32> I agree, Patreon is a much saner model that content creators I actually care about are using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Make 25% of your ads go away" feels a whole lot like the "cable TV will have less ads" promise of old. We all know how that turned out.

The outcome of this is going to be "publishers run extra ads, you pay to make the extra ads go away".

<comment><USER34> wasn't the promise of cable no ads rather than less?

<comment><USER35> yep. satellite radio too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How is this not April?

The problem with this approach is this -- you're still bidding on the ad spot. While this is cool, here are ignored issues:

1\. It removes Google ads, which are arguably the least annoying ads.

2\. Since it is still ad-spot based revenues, it gives a publisher no real business model switch to stop using ads in the long run. It is pretty agnostic that way, publisher does not care who bid on the ad spot.

3\. No way for publisher to go ad-free.

4\. Still got all the nasty ad networks, other benefits of ad-blocking like tracking, speed are not gained.

I think this is cool to remove Google's ads, but I would yearn the day where there is a Spotify-like way of opting out of ads altogether for millions of websites. I mean this from publisher side of things. Someone should give them an option to get paid for hits without putting up ads.

But then again, I don't mind ads that much.

</comment><comment><USER37> The best part about this is that you have really fine grained control over where your money goes.

Don't like it going to a specific site? You can disable just that site in the settings.

Want to replace ads with an image of something random? You can do that as well!

Want to only have contributor run on a few hand-picked sites? Can do that too!

A friend of mine has it setup so that it's whitelist only where he disables his adblock just for those sites, and allows contributor to work only on them.

It's actually a really nice and well thought out system.

<comment><USER38> This is exactly what I was considering. Basically only paying for the content that I think has value by disabling uBlock or w/e for those sites.

It would be nice if I wasn't also being tracked though since I'm paying for the content myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> There's another way ... it may sound a bit crazy at first, but I think it's the only approach that will work.

 __* Advertisers must start paying visitors to view their ads __*

Not just for clicking on ads, but simply for loading them into your browser and looking at them or listening to them.

I read somewhere yesterday that the ad business is $40 billion/year. None of that money goes to the people who are being abused daily by the onslaught of mental pollution that this "industry" produces.

What should be troubling to all advertisers, is that almost all of this stuff is displayed to people who will never buy their products.

Luckily, we have the mechanisms now to efficiently do this: Bitcoin etc. I foresee a payment system, probably mostly run by Google since they are the most connected to the current system, to mediate between ad-viewers and ad- producers.

There's the problem of detecting bots vs. people, but that already exists.

This system would also be good for website owners (content creators). A website owner would benefit by providing a reason for people to visit, thereby also gaining a percentage of the ad revenue. People visiting a website would be, in a sense, qualified-buyers of the products that could be advertised there, resulting in more targeted ads, perhaps by using the bitcoin addresses and the associated browsing history (something that's also already tracked but without consent).

I think it's the only way out of this mess. I don't have all the details worked out, I'm sure someone out there knows how to make it work.

<comment><USER5> > None of that money goes to the people who are being abused daily by the > onslaught of mental pollution that this "industry" produces.

Why should it? They're the ones consuming the free content. They get to view whatever content they're looking at, for free. You watch a funny cat video on youtube, that's your "reward". That's the product you're buying with your time.

I don't know why people feel so entitled to free stuff. They forget that the content they're viewing is _subsidized_ by ads. It's only free _because_ of ads.

Here's a question; Would you sit through a 60 second commercial to watch a completely brand new episode of Game of Thrones that no one has seen yet? If not, then switch Game of Thrones to whatever your favorite TV show is. Is the answer now yes? Ok, good. Now why should the advertiser _also_ pay you to view the ad? Your "payment" is getting to watch game of thrones. The people who created game of thrones should the one's getting paid by the advertiser, not you.

Now I know not all content is "good" and worth your time viewing ads, but that's a matter of subjectivity and not really worth discussing. Everyone has different tastes when it comes to content. What matters is the fact that content is subsidized ads. For whatever reason, this is an extremely hard concept for many people to grasp. As a content creator myself, it's extremely frustrating.

<comment><USER39> I understand your frustration! Everyone wants to believe that what they create has value and that people should pay something to enjoy it.

But we can't escape the reality that the world is being changed dramatically by technology and that the concept of "cost gravity" is unstoppable. Pieter Hintjens has a very good essay on this at [http://cultureandempire.com](http://cultureandempire.com)

This is what we're seeing with adblocking - the technology to control which information is allowed to enter our brains is now available to everyone. Your brain is your most valuable organ, and it is highly susceptible to persuasion and influence through positive and negative images, greed, fear and jealousy. All of these can be, and are, manipulated by advertisers for their benefit.

It has always been an arms race. In the "good old days", when everyone watched TV in the evening with their family, advertising was probably necessary to support the content. Then after a few years the ads got louder (the volume was actually increased) so that people would pay attention during the commercial breaks. People discovered that their remote controls had a mute button, and then they had some welcome silence between movie episodes. Commercial breaks started to get longer and people discovered that they could record everything and fast-forward through the commercial breaks, saving much valuable time. A president of the MPAA (Jack Valenti I think) actually said that it should be illegal to skip through the advertising when viewing time-shifted video because that deprived the broadcaster of the revenue to which they were entitled.

Even movie theaters, where the assumption was that you could watch the movie since you paid for admission, started to show advertising at the beginning. At first it was just a couple of quick minutes before the feature, but that soon became many more minutes and now is at about 30 minutes (advertising thinly disguised as games and quizzes).

My simple proposal is that this downward spiral can be stopped, if advertisers accept that people want to control what they see and hear in an increasingly noisy world, and that this is both legitimate and necessary.

Regarding your question about why an advertiser should also pay me to watch an ad in addition to a Game of Thrones episode: Because, if they paid me, I would listen to their pitch. That's much more valuable than blindly displaying ads with the hope that 0.1% or less of the ad recipients would pay any attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> For the ~price of Netflix subscription, I only get 25-50% fewer ads? Nah...too expensive.

<comment><USER41> If it was any cheaper then people would believe ads have very little value which leads to thinking an ad-blocker isn't really harming anyone. I wouldn't be surprised if this product is really, at least in part, a PR move to get people to think seeing adverts is the equivalent of 'saving' $20/month for web content.

<comment><USER42> Which is interesting because of how many people mention that adds really only contribute a small fraction of that. From what I can find $1 per 1000 impressions seems to be about average for ad revenue.

That means that if I go to 1000 websites in a month I'd expect to pay about $1. I'd be interested to see how many impressions I make per month and find out how much money I actually generate for these websites.

I'd also be interested in a focused ad session to reduce the cost of my browsing. I.E. you show me products and I actually click on them to check them out, and you add money to my pool for browsing. It would have to be an opt-in scenario, but that would be an alternative to paying and seeing ads while you browse.

<comment><USER43> If there are 6 ads on a page, do you visit 5 pages on average a day? I don't think that is many. These things multiply quickly.

<comment><USER42> Ha good point. I'm going to circle back to the comment above mine though. I'm going to change his $20 to $15 because that is the highest amount listed on their site.

I'm also going to factor in that this only removes at most 50% of the ads. we are talking about vising something like 166 (15000/30/6 *2(for the 50%)) pages on an average day. And those are pages with google ads only.

So do I visit 166 pages with 6 google ads on it a day? I don't honestly know but I doubt it.

Now if I could pay $15 a month to remove ALL ads, I think that would be worth my money, even though I still doubt that I visit 166 pages a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44>
      Q: Isn't there a waitlist to join? Or I need an invite
      or something?
      A: Not anymore! You can sign up immediately and support
      tons of websites with one monthly payment.

Unfortunately, I still get this:

Join the waitlist

Contributor is not yet available in your country.

:(

<comment><USER45> I'm seeing this too, from Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > This is cool for several reasons:

4\. Google gets paid, rather than all the money going to the actual website.

<comment><USER47> This is just you buying the ad slot instead of the advertiser. Why should it be any different for the website's income?

If anything, more entities bidding for the ad means the prices can go higher and the website gets more money (though I imagine any difference here would be undetectable).

<comment><USER46> > Why should it be any different for the website's income?

Because the point is that a lot of people who block ads, don't actually like advertising. I would hazard a guess that they want to support websites, but they don't want to support advertising companies, and validate their business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> When I visited Yahoo the other day and looked at the very long list of URLs necessary to track me and to display ads, I knew that the same system without this feature would be a lot cheaper and a lot faster (read: less servers are required).

The next thought was that a paid service with a low fee for Yahoo news, email etc. can be profitable and have happy users.

</comment><comment><USER49> To offer some perspective on the advertiser side:

1) Content costs money. Only way to pay is directly or indirectly (via ads). Ads are the only micropayment system that works at scale so far because it has no overhead of decisions or funds transfer and is monetarily "free". It's also more anonymous than direct payments.

2) Ads do work. Very well. Billions of dollars, millions of work-hours and petabytes of data prove this daily.

3) Ads aren't going anywhere and the industry will not disappear. It's bigger and stronger than ever with billions of clicks, pageviews, video views, tweets, likes, posts, snapchats, etc being sent every day. The technology for delivering ads will change along with more embedded/sponsored content but this model will always be valid.

4) What we're seeing is a reset in the industry to finally care more about the user experience (because they have more control now). Best case scenario - <USER2> have better ads, revenue and consumer experiences. Worse case - we're right back where we started or even a whole lot worse with more data tracking. Either scenarios are equally possible.

</comment><comment><USER50> I love the concept of this. Essentially it's just letting you enter the ad auction for yourself, with a monthly spending cap (I imagine it's a little trickier under the hood, but maybe not _that_ much trickier).

I signed up yesterday after a friend mentioned it, and it's near. It's definitely a minority of ads, but it's still nicer to see cat pics than other shit.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is great, now wealthy tech/content moral apologists can pay for the content they want while the rest of us can get on with our lives about using ad-blockers.

Most of those properties, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Business Insider are currently making a profit, so why is there this moral outrage that they are not getting paid? These businesses are not charities, they are not owed your money when they choose to display free content with easily blocked ads, they are businesses.

<comment><USER52> You really think they'll continue to make money when inevitably adblocker software on any browser becomes as ubiquitous as messenger or camera software on a phone? That's the whole issue. The current ad model isn't really sustainable in that light. There's no outrage they're not getting paid, there is concern that extrapolating current trends, they won't get paid a few years down the line and will either shut down or enforce changes that radically change the internet for the worse.

You can either get a closed market where every piece of content is paid for like Netflix and you start to see all kinds of lock-in effects that drive monopolies (if I switch from this vendor to a slightly better one I can't transfer my music/files/videos/articles etc, so I'd rather stay with what I have), as well as putting a price floor on information that used to be free with inconvenience for potentially hundreds of millions who can't afford the digital subscription, which radically changes the internet. Or you can get a different compensation model for content, like paying not to see ads without having to subscribe to a particular business's content, or buy their content pieces on their platform. This is what that is.

Or you simply believe that the rapid growth of ad blockers will taper off fairly quickly and never constitute a significant threat. Possible but I think pretty naive.

<comment><USER5> > Or you simply believe that the rapid growth of ad blockers will taper off > fairly quickly and never constitute a significant threat. Possible but I > think pretty naive.

A third option that I think is the most likely (because it's already begun to happen): Programs & plugins for websites that serve ads up natively from the local website. This means there's no call to a third party. It means there would be nothing to block and the ad gets through.

If the ad is a simple image or gif file, an ad blocker would have no way to tell what it is. It wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat with a piece of bread on its head or an ad for denture cream. This is because the picture is coming from the website you're visiting and could have a name like cute- cat.jpg. It basically nullifies the host file for ad blockers.

That's what I think is going to happen. All the big ad companies (cough, google) need to do is revamp their ad network slightly and ad blockers become significantly less useful overnight.

I'm not saying it would make ad blockers 100% obsolete, far from it. They'd still be useful. But a lot, and I mean _a lot_ more ads would get through that wouldn't have before. If even 40% more get through, that's still a huge number.

<comment><USER53> You're saying that there's going to be an arms race between advertisers and ad blockers and you assume advertisers are going to win by fuzzing the definition of "ad". Is that a good thing? It sounds like a local maximum to me, like native advertising, and not really a step in the right direction.

In The Ideal World ad blockers wouldn't exist because we'd all be happy paying our fair share to content creators. This seems pretty far off from the current status quo, but running an ad blocker today is only adding fuel to the fire. If advertisers step up their game and ads become unblockable, we might be closing the door to a better solution and be stuck with ads forever.

<comment><USER5> > Is that a good thing?

A very good thing, actually. For starters, nobody minds ads. They subsidize content. Without ads, the internet wouldn't exist in its current iteration.

What people are against are malicious ads and the like. If an ad is a simple gif or jpg (picture), there can be no maliciousness. It makes ads relatively safe again. And content creators actually make money, incentivizing better and more content. Everyone wins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This is a temporary fix. Despite the few conscientious objectors, ad-blockers will be ubiquitous. My best guess:

Big-name websites will show more native adds. Companies will be desperate after losing digital adds, especially with the move to on-demand TV - they'll look to spend more on these.

Other sites will look to survive by direct payment. We'll see more (and possibly higher) paywalls. Donations will become necessary for those who can't get away with paywalls. It will be harder to keep a small operation self- sufficient.

Basically, adds will either still be there (just less obvious) or you'll be paying the difference. This will come at the expense of many small sites.

</comment><comment><USER55> What a backwards way to become the middle man in almost all internet monetization.

<comment><USER56> Become? I'm pretty sure they already hold that title, or close to it, via adwords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> "Contributor is not available in your country."

Well, I guess my Euros aren't good enough for content creators. Unfortunately for them, my privacy is not a currency I will use to pay for content.

<comment><USER58> You have to be logged into a Google account to use Contributor anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> So with this system, the same amount of space is still taken up by ads? I don't think that's really a huge improvement.

I think my ideal system would be something where a website can offer a bitcoin* address in a header, and at the end of the month my browser randomly picks a set of addresses it's seen, and sends money to them. (In conjunction with current ad-blocking technology.)

* Bitcoin probably wouldn't work due to transaction limits, but maybe some sort of sidechain, alternative coin, or something similar.

<comment><USER60> > I think my ideal system would be something where a website can offer a > bitcoin* address in a header, and at the end of the month my browser > randomly picks a set of addresses it's seen, and sends money to them. (In > conjunction with current ad-blocking technology.)

This is so ripe for abuse it's not even funny. It would take clickjacking to a whole new level.

This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else they're wide open to abuse.

<comment><USER61> > _This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be > frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price > is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else > they 're wide open to abuse._

I agree. I solved this problem with a 3-party protocol (user, provider, authenticator) that can't be subverted by either the user or the provider.

No user intervention is required; it works seamlessly. User identity is not revealed and the provider cannot piggyback on the shared tokens to create a persistent identifier. The same scheme can be used to provide effortless passage through paywalls, as well as enabling the same model as Contributor (and before them Kachingle, Contenture, Readability and several others who've failed).

<comment><USER60> As the authenticator would essentially need to maintain a list of verified providers, you would have to do a lot of work to figure out which providers are legit and which are fraudulent. Even distributed across a whole bunch of transactions, the cost is likely too high when each transaction is a fraction of a cent. That's just a show-stopper for microtransactions.

The technology is the easy part for microtransactions. Simplifying the business rules to the point it can cheap enough to operate financial transactions safely is the hard part.

<comment><USER61> > _As the authenticator would essentially need to maintain a list of verified > providers, you would have to do a lot of work to figure out which providers > are legit and which are fraudulent._

If payment is proportional to usage, then a linkbait/clickbait scheme won't work. The point is to reward genuine repeat visits to a site you like.

If the profit is too low, fraudsters simply go elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I love Contributor, but I'll just leave this here: [http://www.smbc- comics.com/?id=2490](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490)

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't use an adblocker, I use a script blocker. It's not about the ads. It's about being re-marketed, tracked, herded, bought and sold by every scummy marketing department in some of the vilest organisations of people the Earth has ever seen.

Yes. I want Dave and Leela, bloggers of great human interest, or my favourite journos and comic strip artists to all get paid handsomely for their contributions to mankind. But I don't want a third party sat in the middle of that transaction. Particularly not _that_ one.

Work needs doing on both sides of the deal. More donation culture, easier methods, and more motivation to write content that contributes something new for the good of society, however that may be, for the commons. Less rehashed tripe split ten ways, more genuinely deeply considered works that can be easily rewarded. That's what the script blocking movement is really about.

Final word, I'm sick of this pervasive attitude that people think they're doing the creator a favour if they pay them. I'm paying you, you get _my_ endorsement, do you have any idea how special that makes you, makes us? We're friends now and everything! Get real. It's ego-mania of the highest form. There are no strings attached to any purchase and the seller owes you nothing beyond what you agreed to buy. Support them without any expectation of even the slightest of ego kickbacks and you'll have your integrity. This Contributor service has an issue with a lack of integrity at its very core. Perverted altruism. A wolf in sheep's clothing.

</comment><comment><USER64> If I can do this anonymously I'm sold. I think there is a considerable overlap between the target group for this feature and the group of privacy aware people.

Let us create anonymous profiles, give us the possibility to pay via prepaid card and you will be our hero again, Google.

</comment><comment><USER65> I like that people are thinking in this direction, and I would in principle be happy to pay a smallish monthly fee instead of just using an ad blocker. But this system doesn't really solve the issues I have with ads.

</comment><comment><USER66> Google Contributor is a fantastic idea, and it's (almost) exactly the sort of thing I'd want for a content-provider-supporting endgame.

Unfortunately, its a non-starter because it requires browsing while logged into a Google account. I refuse to do that. Not that I believe this will actually prevent Google from tracking me, but because I don't want to make it any easier than it already is.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't understand why people are trying to soften the blow for content- providers who generate revenue through intrusive, annoying, and privacy- invading ads.

Why are you defending people who clearly do not respect you?

Why are you paying a tax ($15/mo for Google Contributor) to make it so that these people can continue to operate on a broken business model?

Why are you so scared of the internet changing? It's nonsensical.

</comment><comment><USER68> Google already pays to remove adblockers. [http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/03/amazon-google- microsoft-a...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/03/amazon-google-microsoft- adblock-plus/)

On the other hand, looks like a nice social engineering experiment in figuring out how to convince users to be tracked better.

</comment><comment><USER69> I think it is a great idea. I probably won't use it, I tend to just tolerate ads and don't mind them if they aren't obnoxious. I get a lot of Amazon ads, and they typically show things that I am very much in the market for, since they know what I've bought and looked at. I don't mind that kind of ad.

What's needed is for ad blockers to have a setting that lets these Contributor "ads" through and blocks the rest, with the setting preferably on by default. My opinion is that use of an ad blocker, while refusing to pay for something like this (especially if it is priced such that Google and the web site make the same amount of money as if you saw the ads), is not ethical, as you are being a freeloader.

All the arguments made by those defending ad blockers tend to fall away when something like this is available. If you don't like ads, and don't want to pay directly, you probably shouldn't be consuming the content.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem with this scheme is that it still involves trusting the ad platform, the advertisers (some still show), and the ad strategy of the website. Trusting them to not serve anything nasty, trusting them to account for our money correctly, trusting them to show moderation in the number of ad 'slots' they try to fill.

Ad blockers remove that trust. The industry has shown they are untrustworthy, overall (i.e. there are some that are trustworthy, but you have no way of identifying if a particular site will have only them showing, or even if it will be the same next time you visit).

I adblock. I also back a range of Patreons, and regularly support some other sites. For example, I support BoardGameGeek. I'd support more content creators if that were a possibility. But I'm not going to do it via the proxy of the advertising platforms.

</comment><comment><USER70> or, here's a crazy idea, I keep adblocking, and keep my money?

I adblock not to block ads, but for privacy. I don't like being tracked, and using contributor won't fix that

</comment><comment><USER71> Does this sound like a good old fashioned "pay for protection" type business model to anyone else?

<comment><USER72> No the emperor's clothes are fantastic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It is just short of mafia protection money.

The concept that as a user, I don't know the ultimate bribe cost. Plus constant worry that it may go up or worse, the rules have changed and prices( read bribes ) went up. What a backwards way of shimmying your way into what should be : consumer + producer relationship.

I want to live in a reality where I know your costs and you tell me how much divided amongst your users is my share to pay. Let's get Google out of the equation.

What if we had mandatory HTTP headers: "Content-Cost: 0.02" and my browser had a credit card linked against it and I will decide if your content is good enough to buy.

Ads are evil. The industry is evil. And I don't mean it in a bible-churchy- preachy way. These are not people I will ever support with my coin.

</comment><comment><USER74> This still gives Google the ability to track the web pages we visit, and many of us block ads because of tracking, not because they're ugly.

That said, I do think that solutions like Google Contributor are the way forward if it can become an open standard that supports anonymization. I'm willing to trust my browser and a local, open-source wallet to watch the sites that I visit and authorize micro-payments via an anonymous currency. Those payments could be delivered to websites via middlemen that include ad vendors like Google or other processors.

It would require careful design and numerous security considerations, but it seems possible to use this model to support publishers while maintaining privacy.

</comment><comment><USER75> umm, [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/), anyone?

</comment><comment><USER76> I would pay $2 to $10 per month to remove all adds from youtube. I would not bother with this.

</comment><comment><USER77> The reality is that few people will do this as long as it's optional. The masses are short-sighted. For anything like this to work, a publisher needs to block the display of their content if ad-blocking is in place. They could bring up something that says "you have one of two choices: go to <Google contributor-like network> and pay, or disable your adblocker". If people run into this enough, they'll do one or the other.

<comment><USER78> Actually you just need to hold down the refresh button to be able to reload with content blockers temporarily disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I'm one of those who don't really care about advertising but doesn't want to be tracked everywhere, so this is sort of the worst of both worlds for me.

</comment><comment><USER80> At the end of the day, people don't seem to care about whether content- creators get paid. And why should they? There's an almost inexhaustible source of "content" (whatever that means) and for every creator that steps down, another will step in.

I will continue to use an ad blocker and _not_ pay Google, thank you very much.

If you want me to consume ads, make ads I want to consume.

</comment><comment><USER81> I have always thought, the extra packets received by ads add up to my internet bills. Now I can serve a blank page and save some data. ;)

</comment><comment><USER82> Does this work on YouTube ads? If so, I'd pony up in a heartbeat...

<comment><USER83> Same here. I'd happily pay a monthly subscription to stop seeing ads in the YouTube iPad app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I don't like the current proposition: you pay for seeing less ads, but there's no tier guaranteeing no ads. Even if they guarantee 99% less ads, I still wouldn't sign for it.

Paying for seeing less ads does not change the incentives for tracking and targeting, and may even worsen them: surely Google will start by cutting the less targeted ads and will keep the most targeted ones. The more I cut the ads, the more targeted the remaining ads will be, and stronger will be their incentive to track and analyze my behavior.

Only by a policy of no ads and no other revenue stream besides my money would avoid some of these perverse incentives.

Of course, Google Contributor would still have to track the sites I visit, so I wouldn't be able to prevent tracking with a technical tool if I signed for it. This adds even more to the argument that Contributor is only an option if no ads are allowed, so that he incentives for targeting and analysis are now removed.

</comment><comment><USER85> The only time I clicked on an ad, it was an ad about a product in Amazon I previously intended to purchase but it didn't have stock.

My reaction was a "wow, does it have stock now??? let me hurry!!! what? no stock? why do you advertise a product without stock???"

After that moment, the ad kept following me during several days...

</comment><comment> tefo-mohapi The issue with digital media vs print is that people are already paying for connectivity to the internet making them less likely to want to pay for access to content. We've seen it with music and video and will continue seeing it with text / news content.

</comment><comment><USER86> Has anyone arrived at an estimate that puts the cost in terms of CPM?

I know that at least in terms of what makes it out to RTB across most of the exchanges, a person like me will account for about 1000 bid requests in a month. Even if we pad that significantly, there's a good chance I'd be paying paying a pretty rich CPM rate.

Given that folks who would likely sign up for this are probably not heavy clickers, my strong hunch is that Google is raking in a pretty fat margin. If an advertiser really wants you, they pay up and you see the ad. In other words, you're probably competing with advertisers to drive up the price of the impression.

</comment><comment><USER87> This will probably only block the ads that don't bother me, text and banners. The part I hate is the javascript bloat that loads from 1000 domains, the fullscreen popup that asks me to subscribe, and the autoplaying videos.

</comment><comment><USER88> This seems neat, but can I still use noscript and my ad blocker? I feel like the ads need to be display-able for their backend to know I'm visiting a page. But I use noscript and ublock, so it would fail to pay out.

<comment><USER89> My experiments so far (with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Exploding Cookies, and Random User Agent all on) suggest no. It seems like you'd have to do some extra work to whitelist sites so that they could get paid. It isn't clear what GOOG will do with my $2 if they can't attribute my visits...

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> If a single tracker gets through, it's missing the point, at least for me.

</comment><comment><USER91> While I do find ads very mildly annoying, I don't tend to visit too many sites that have very intrusive advertising. My primary reason for using an adblocker (I don't use an adblocker actually, I use uBlock which is more general) is to reduce tracking and increase privacy.

I would previously have assumed that this was the same motivation most technically proficient adblocker users, but the comments here on HN seem to bely that assumption completely.

Are people really that bothered by ads that they would pay Google to continue to track their every move on the web silently???

<comment><USER92> Getting away from tracking is primarily why I use it. I also tend to be surprised by people thinking ad blocking is about blocking ads as well, though. Especially here, maybe it's just a cultural shift towards generally being ok with being tracked. Oh, I hope not, though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Propping up the existing system with money doesn't sound like a solution. If there's a fox in the henhouse, leaving a bowl of fox chow next to the chickens isn't going to fix the problem.

</comment><comment><USER94> I don't always want to be logged into Google.

Edit: Can't shake the thought that this is the mafia offering protection from the bad guys.

I know, I know, this isn't reddit. But it's just an odd thought that I had.

</comment><comment><USER95> And at the same time I make it even easier for google to build a high quality profile of my activities. I'm a bit paranoid, but that bothers me more than actually seeing the ads.

</comment><comment><USER96> Why pay for this is uBlock Origin is free? I never asked for ads, and websites never asked to charge me. I'm not going to pay tons of cash to see -25% ads. Not gonna happen.

</comment><comment><USER97> the interesting part is that he says you basically bid on the placement yourself. Lots of publishers are paid via CPC, so only when clicks are made. I'm guessing this has to be CPM bid then, in which case to be effective you're going to burn through you $2 per month awfully fast.

Another thing - if you're actually taking part in the bidding process this is a trojan horse to jack up the bid prices (they work in an auction format roughly) for everyone else.

Well played, evil Google.

</comment><comment><USER98> I don't think anyone is contesting the fact that ads are needed to pay content creators.

The problem is, if you go to Engadget with ghostery, leave it disabled. It shows 27 additional items loaded in the page. For WHAT?

That's insane. Even imgur has too many external resources for ads and tracking.

If ads were not blocking, intrusive, and there wasn't so many of them and not so much tracking. People probably wouldn't care about ads. But websites like Engadget have ruined it for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER99> Hey! This is kind of cool! I didn't know about this. It's like micropayments- in-a-box. I think I might do this (but have to think about the system).

However, I do have one thought. Google ads initially were incredibly popular because they weren't in your face asking for the monkey to be punched. Which is _still pretty much the case_.

The worst ads aren't being served by Google, they're being served by Tabooleh and the other bad-content farms.

</comment><comment><USER100> Great, finally micropayments [http://www.useit.com/articles/the-case-for- micropayments/](http://www.useit.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/) will work? If Google wants to display its good intentions, they would take a lower percentage when the user bought the ads. The same price paid by an user would top the advertiser.

</comment><comment><USER101> Still relevant: [http://blog.plague-dev.de/posts/Adblock-isnt- immoral](http://blog.plague-dev.de/posts/Adblock-isnt-immoral) .

I still don't get why anyone who puts an html file on a webserver is entitled to earn any money from this. Maybe the constant manipulation from all over the media has something to to with it.

</comment><comment><USER102> IMO, the big problem is that you don't choose who to pay. I don't want to pay to producers of low quality contents and the ones who spammed the google with useless pages which are at the top of the search results for SEO reasons.

IMO, micro-transactions which are used to pay by views are much better option, and google is the company who can implement this.

</comment><comment><USER103> Does $10 really cover the amount sites would be getting if you were looking at ads? I pay more just for NYT (and there's still ads! though not too many)

I wonder how willing people would be to pay (for example) $100 a month for this. Chances are that's more representative of the ad revenue you're generating if you're a heavy reader.

</comment><comment><USER104> Sounds like a great business model:

1\. Get a lot of web pages to show your ads

2\. Charge advertisers for showing their ads

3\. Charge users for not seeing ads

4\. Let the bidding wars begin!

</comment><comment><USER105> Just to clarify, none of the support/money will go to websites that simply don't have ads, right?

</comment><comment><USER106> This is cool, but would it work on my Android browser (which is my main point of contention with ads)?

<comment><USER107> It works anywhere a Google ad works.

<comment><USER106> But how does it know that I'm me? My Google login? I don't think I'm logged in to Google everywhere. Just curious as to how this thing works, basically.

<comment><USER108> More importantly to me: I don't want to login to a Google account. $10 - $15 is a fair price, but I don't want to login.

I feel that if I pay for something and it now requires me to have an account I'm getting a worse experience. This is especially true in this case where a free product like uBlock will yield a better result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> My process:

1\. Read article, sounds like a good idea, maybe I can throw $10 in a month + white-list Google ads in my ad blocker 2\. Go to Contributor website, read through all information aaannnddd "Contributor is not yet available in your country." 3\. Close tabs and move on

</comment><comment><USER110> If people are bothered by ads why not stop visiting those sites? I am not interested to pay to stop ads. As an Indian its pricer to me as well. I don't mind ads if it allows the content creator to publish more. But i do stop visiting sites with craps ads.

</comment><comment><USER111> I'd love to but " Contributor is not yet available in your country. " (Australia)

</comment><comment><USER112> I'd like to see more products/interaction/experiments in the way ChangeTip is going:

[https://www.changetip.com/](https://www.changetip.com/)

It feels way more human than a big corporation's effort, and way more direct.

</comment><comment><USER113> Its unclear to me if you're paying the current rate for the ad space to google or to the amount the creator would get. Eg: Are you buying 1 impression at google's price, or paying the amount the website owner would receive for 1 impression?

</comment><comment><USER114> I'd love it if there was a way to run Contributor while still blocking doubleclick. I'll happily pay, but I'm not turning off adblock, and if I'm paying, I want that page space occupied by the article, not cat pictures.

</comment><comment><USER115> Once everybody is paying to avoid looking at ads, what will be the point of advertising?

<comment><USER116> Once everybody is paying, they'll start slipping ads back in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> Am I the only one who sees this as a defence, and a try to tackle that Apple is promoting an ad free web?

If Google could get a % of the cut, it could help with lost revenue from the many ad blockers.

</comment><comment><USER28> With the recent ad blocker threads I wanted to see how many of my users actually use an adblocker. I have a technical tutorials site that is not that active anymore. I estimate that tech sites will likely have a higher percentage of adblock users. I track this using a Google Analytics custom variable and the blockadblock script (a fork of fuckadblock with a less offensive name).

So far I detect that 15-20% of my users have an adblocker enabled. This probably misses some percentage of people since it uses GA and JS. Users with ghostery or JS disabled won't be detected but it's close enough for me. The numbers are not quite as high as I expected them to be.

</comment><comment><USER118> Can I do this without hiding the ads? I really like the concept of supporting the sites I visit directly and automatically but I prefer to see all ads.

</comment><comment><USER119> I've been trialing Contributor for the past month and there's two reasons I'm going to continue...

1\. It works anywhere I can log into Google, which means I see less ads on my mobile device or in browsers where I might not have been able to install an ad blocking extension.

2\. You can configure what you see in place of most ads. Thus my browsing now has more cats: [http://imgur.com/fqF0YJb](http://imgur.com/fqF0YJb)

The only reason I'm thinking about ditching Contributor at this point is because I'm more of a dog lover.

</comment><comment><USER120> US only.

</comment><comment><USER121> I'd rather pay my favourite artists directly by means of donation or buying their stuff. Why would I need google for that?

</comment><comment><USER122> So to put this simple, I have to pay for what I don't even want in the first place?

All these making money companies, pay this pay that

</comment><comment><USER123> Imagine if ClearChannel offered a way for you to avoid seeing billboards as you drive for a monthly subscription price...

</comment><comment><USER124> If they add some little visual perk, like an icon next to your youtube name, I bet popularity in this would grow.

</comment><comment><USER125> Did this work for anyone? I tried it and saw no change, even on the websites they suggest on the checkout page.

</comment><comment><USER126> Don't anyone here think 45% of the web content are ads which are being forced in to the page?

</comment><comment><USER127> If Google thought there was a problem with intrusive ads, they would penalize them.

</comment><comment><USER128> So you can't try the website before paying right ?

</comment><comment> sudo-i Isn't a form of extortion?

</comment><comment><USER129> Sounds like racketeering :)

</comment><comment><USER130> very cool. Does this block ads on google itself?

</comment><comment><USER131> hahahaha

</comment><comment><USER132> I'd pay to remove the ad makers.

</comment><comment><USER133> I like [https://www.adieu.io/](https://www.adieu.io/). You should try it

</comment><comment><USER134> Of course Google will pocket a big chunk of the revenue, doh! It's a clever scam to exploit people's guilt to get them to part with some cash, nothing more.

Donate directly, your favorite sites, and then block their ads yourself.

Do not pay this "opt-out ransom".

Heck, it's better to send a donation to someone who makes free ad-blocking software.

</comment><comment><USER61> Google Contributor can't work, for two reasons.

1\. As soon as it becomes too widespread, Google will nerf it. They rely almost entirely on advertising for their revenues. There's just too much money for them to not water the scheme down in future.

Remember when cable TV was going to be ad-free?

2\. It only works inside Google's semi-walled garden. This is true of every microsubscription scheme so far built (Spotify, Amazon Underground, Apple Music). They have all required a walled garden in order to avoid massive fraud and money laundering.

I'm biased, because it so happens that I solved the second problem. I have a patented protocol which is opt-in, can reliably track users on the web without identifying them and which is resistant to fraudulent visits.

I'm building the first release. Contact me if you're interested: email@example.com.

<comment><USER135> > As soon as it becomes too widespread, Google will nerf it. They rely almost > entirely on advertising for their revenues.

Contributor directly replaces advertising revenue; if it provides a better UX for end-users, sites that use exclusively traditional advertising rather than Google's model with Contributor will suffer reduced traffic (and thus, won't get money from advertising.)

If Contributor gets widespread, its good for Google, increases costs for advertisers to reach eyeballs (whether they use Google's ad network or not), and bad for ad networks other than Google's that don't do something like what Google is doing with Contributor.

> It only works inside Google's semi-walled garden.

It certainly only works on sites that actively choose to use Google's advertising network. I'm not sure that's a "walled garden" in any meaningful sense.

<comment><USER61> If the price of advertising goes up, Google will be incentivised to water down Contributor. An equilibrium might form, but in the long run it probably won't be "ad free". Google can't get away from the contradiction.

> _I 'm not sure that's a "walled garden" in any meaningful sense._

Hence "semi-walled". It's walled in the sense that only Google's ads are affected. They can somewhat reliably track users on sites that belong to Google's network. They can't do so otherwise. I imagine they solve fraud with their existing tools.

<comment><USER135> > If the price of advertising goes up, Google will be incentivised to water > down Contributor.

The Contributor model, as I understand it, intrinsically scales costs (or effects) to the cost of advertising, with participants effectively bidding against advertisers for their own views. So, no, they wouldn't be incentivized to water it down if the price of advertising goes up, rather, the fact of Contributors success would drive the market-clearing price of advertising up _while_ driving up Google's revenues from its ad networks, simply by increasing the market for its ad networks from "advertisers" to "advertisers + contributors".

> An equilibrium might form, but in the long run it probably won't be "ad > free".

It will probably be ad free for the users willing to pay the most money to avoid ads, and less so for those willing to pay less.

Which, ultimately, is a pretty reasonable market-based solution. You choose the content you wish to consume, and you choose the degree to which you'd prefer to pay money vs. viewing ads.

<comment><USER61> I still disagree that Google won't water it down, or raise the price of Contributor. But I'm obviously talking my own book and they theirs, so YMMV.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: React Bindings for FeathersJS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/indatawetrust/use-feathers <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all. In my spare time I want to introduce my package that I am working on. A small package that I developed with react for react. Currently, functions for auth operations and crud operations are available. You can visit [https://github.com/indatawetrust/use- feathers](https://github.com/indatawetrust/use-feathers) for codes and [https://naughty-cray-bdab6d.netlify.app/](https://naughty-cray- bdab6d.netlify.app/) for demo. Thank you.</comment>


Scientists demonstrate Matrix-like learning with no conscious effort - <AUTHOR> http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&preview=false <comment><USER2> This submission's title is misleading, and the original work could be better summarized as "improving at one task while doing another". The authors first determined a pattern of brain activation (indexed by blood flow) associated with the presentation of a target (visual) stimulus for a given subject. Then, they gave subjects real-time feedback about their brain activation while they performed a superficially different task. The trick is that the feedback on the second, different task was based on a subject's ability to cause the same pattern of brain activation (again, indexed by blood flow) that the experimenters first observed when the target stimulus was presented in the earlier session. Finally, subjects were tested on their ability to identify the target stimulus and others like it, and they showed a statistically reliable improvement for the (unknowingly) trained target, but not for other, similar items. It's fascinating, but suggesting that this is anything like what's been depicted in science fiction movies (yes, like The Matrix) is silly.

<comment><USER3> _It's fascinating, but suggesting that this is anything like what's been depicted in science fiction movies (yes, like The Matrix) is silly._

It's certainly a big leap beyond what's actually been demonstrated here. But it is a _very_ interesting first step along that path, and if something like Matrix-style learning was ever going to be possible, I'd imagine this would be the most fruitful approach to follow.

Just to be clear: what's going on here is essentially that they've set up an apparatus to display an error function that measures the difference between the target and actual brain states in a person, and asked the person to minimize that error. The idea would be that by trying to match brain states you could shortcut the learning process that lead to that brain state, and instead skip directly to the result. Pretty standard optimization problem, except that it involves the brain.

The difficulties come in two parts:

1) Is it possible to efficiently "navigate" your own brain state based on feedback towards a target based on an error function, and do so well enough to jump out of crappy local maxima? More generally, is it possible to reliably navigate to a target brain state quickly enough so that it's more efficient than actually going through the learning process that the target state was arrived at from?

2) Can we even measure "brain state" accurately enough so that successful completion of 1) would be useful at all?

1) is a biological question, 2) is technical. This particular research doesn't offer much on either front, sadly, because the task they picked was so simple that it would clearly have been better achieved by direct learning (they spent several days training people on the "error function", and I can't imagine it took that long to recognize an orientation of an image for the training group...).

I'd be very skeptical about how useful low resolution views of brain activity will be when it comes to higher level understanding rather than simple visual recognition tasks. And I'd also be skeptical about whether we'd still be able to effectively navigate our brains through the fitness landscapes if we ever did achieve resolution good enough to help with more difficult tasks.

But I don't think it's a wash. It's pretty likely that even low-res views of brain activity for certain tasks can be helpful - if you could match your brain activity even at a rough scale to the way Richard Feynman's looked when he was thinking about physics, it would probably put you in a better state of mind to do physics than you might have been otherwise, and that could still be useful, even if it couldn't directly transfer his knowledge about QED to your brain.

If we ever get to a point where scanners are much better, I imagine there will be quite the industry in picking out which low-res reductions of high-res brain activity are the best to use as training targets...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the full report at Science: <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.full>

</comment><comment><USER5> Brainwashing now has a science behind it.

Interesting, but could be bad:

1 - larger divide between those who can afford a service like this and those who can't

2 - governments and other entities can use it to brainwash people to create highly ideological and loyal agents/staff.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't really understand why this is so significant or perhaps I don't understand the experiment. You are fed some training set and a certain brain activity pattern is identified as the "target." Then you show a whole bunch of other stimuli and try to teach the brain to display the target activity pattern for a different stimulus by having this proxy indicator that tells you how close you are (green disk).

Don't we do this all the time? If I'm teaching a child the letters of the alphabet then I would show an example, have them try to guess it and then give them some indication of how close they are (yes you got it, you are pronouncing it weird, no that's the wrong letter). The only difference here is that you are using proxy whereby you identify a target brain activity pattern first. It seems pretty much impossible, however, to get a target for an individual without first seeing what the target is. Certainly everyone's "target" for the same problem must look quite different.

I suppose this could be pretty useful for brain-computer interfaces but I don't know if I'd go as far as saying this is matrix-like learning.

<comment><USER7> Why do we need computers? We already have the abacus.

<comment><USER8> Well, my abacus doesn't seem to support Flash.

<comment><USER9> Who needs flash when you have abacus?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks either very amazing, or complete BS. I want examples. How did their experiments work? I don't care what it is that I'm learning, I wanna see a demo. Is there something I can buy/fund/donate to? Shut up and take my money.

<comment><USER11> >I don't care what it is that I'm learning

What if it's obedience? :)

<comment><USER12> As with all technologies, there is use and there is misuse. These sort of fears are why I don't work for the government, but it doesn't stop things from being discovered. Indeed, discovery isn't evil, only what these discoveries and advancements may be used for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might as well take the chance to go slightly off-topic: anyone here a skill acquisition nerd? What methods do you utilize to gain more "I know Kung Fu" moments in life? :)

<comment><USER14> I'm kind of an interested dabbler in such brain hacking... one principle I try to follow is to use multiple parts of (that conglomerate called) my mind to learn things. So for example, take programming techniques. Using data-directed programming techniques lets me use the visual parts of my mind more directly... so in Lisp or Javascript, you'd make a pretty datastructure which you'd code plumbing to interpret. Same with drawing pictures to help visualize, such as graphs. (The old _Data and Reality_ mentions we frequently use graphs in representing concepts on the computer, as opposed to in data processing.)

And using a REPL is very interactive, and uses my kinesthetic parts. (Some emacs chords may have that effect too, like paredit's alt-shift-(, which surrounds the next form in a parenthesis bubble.)

Alan Kay mentions the study of like 50 mathematicians, how they thought. Surprisingly few thought in terms of symbols. Most were primarily visual thinkers. Some were also kinesthetic. (To lend credibility, people always mention Einstein was in this last kinesthetic group.)

Another is critical learning. So you try to question why something Is The Way It Is, why someone believes what they believe... (Being confused is a very good sign; explore the confusion. Confusion over very simple things led to revolutions in our knowledge.) This takes you from the role of passive learner to co-creator. (Of course, time is limited, and taking this to its logical extreme would mean you'd do multiple ten-year research projects... Might be great for humanity's knowledge, but few of us have this luxury.)

<comment><USER13> _Most were primarily visual thinkers. Some were also kinesthetic._

Speaking of visual-kinesthetic thinkers, this is kinda interesting: [http://www.nlplive.com/nlp/tim-ferriss-mind-hack-by-mr- twent...](http://www.nlplive.com/nlp/tim-ferriss-mind-hack-by-mr-twenty- twenty/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't wait until advertisers and SuperPACs get a hold of this.

<comment><USER16> Won't do them any good until they have remote fMRI scanners. Which would be positively scary.</comment></comment>


If you hashed a hash ad nauseum would you end up with a unique hash? - <AUTHOR> http://crypto.stackexchange.com/q/25243/4816

<comment><USER2> I also like its "cousin" question:

[http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2670/is-every- outp...](http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/2670/is-every-output-of-a- hash-function-possible)</comment>


Ask HN: Do I need a terms of service? - <AUTHOR> I have a free mobile app for a niche community (~1300 users and growing) that requires user registration. I don't show ads, but I do use mixpanel for analytics. I have a growing concern that I am exposed somehow, but am having trouble finding resources that clarify best practices with regards to web services and the law.
At what point do I need to have a terms of service, where can I find a good terms of service boilerplate, and are there any good resources for tech and law?
Thanks in advance for any help. <comment><USER2> You may need a Terms of Service but also a Privacy Policy, which is required by law if you collect personal data.

The Privacy Policy is also required by Mixpanel. If you're using the tracking tool it means that you're agreeing with the terms of Mixpanel ([https://mixpanel.com/terms/](https://mixpanel.com/terms/)). The terms require you to inform users that you are using Mixpanel. You also need to inform users about the opt-out policy of Mixpanel.

>>> include a notice about the Mixpanel opt-out for Customer's site and the Mixpanel opt-out link in Customer's privacy policy or in a notice on Customer's website(s). >>> Terms of Use of Mixpanel

The Terms of Service agreement isn't usually required by law but you can use it to include guidelines and rules for users to agree with and follow if they want to join your community (i.e. no spamming other users, no abusive accounts etc.)

Hopefully our two presentations on these agreements will help you:

1\. What's a Privacy Policy --> [https://www.slideshare.net/termsfeed/the- privacy-policy-agre...](https://www.slideshare.net/termsfeed/the-privacy- policy-agreement)

2\. What's a Terms & Conditions --> [https://www.slideshare.net/termsfeed/whats-a-terms-and- condi...](https://www.slideshare.net/termsfeed/whats-a-terms-and-conditions- agreement)

Also, it's important to research how to integrate and get consent to the legal agreements you make available to your users. For this, research "clickwrap".

<comment><AUTHOR> I do (very casually) mention that we use mixpanel for analytics on the 'about' modal, but I'll look into making those changes.

I'll look into your provided resources before asking any follow-ups. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did a quick search on google and found this: [http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com](http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com)</comment>


Ask HN:Will internet cost drop when SPACE X satellites start providing internet? - <AUTHOR> The cost of internet service is mounting while speeds are not improving. A reasonable high-speed intent plan costs $60/month on average. I was thinking if prices would drop when SPACEX satellites start providing internet. <comment><USER2> I would be very shocked if prices when up.

Unless they are targeting a niche market, I expect prices will drop. in other words, what percentage of the market are they targeting? If it is just people who do not have access, then no it will not. If they are targeting people with crappy internet, then the price of crappy internet will probably go down to stay competitive.

In addition it depends on quality. If you are a twitch game player, you are willing to pay for whomever provides the least lag time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Satellite broadband is expensive and slow relative to other forms of internet connectivity, and whilst Space-X (and OneWeb et al) might well bring the cost of satellite internet connectivity down, I don't see them undercutting the people sending data down your existing phone lines any time soon

</comment><comment><USER4> Basic economy says more supply will bring price down. So yes, prices will drop if the supply is significant. If they provide internet to 100k people it's not significant. If they can provide internet to 50million households yup. I'm assuming in the US/North American market.

</comment><comment><USER5> That should depend on the protocol they are using. If it is some new experimental protocol the cost will rise first before it normalises.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes</comment>


Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams - <AUTHOR> https://www.math3ma.com/blog/matrices-as-tensor-network-diagrams <comment><USER3> If I remember correctly, Einstein struggled with Tensors and enlisted his friend Mercel Grossmann to help him develop the Tensor Calculus he needed for the General Theory of Relativity. Einstein was no mathematical slouch, obviously, but it's nice to know that even the most brilliant sometimes need some help from their friends.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, the "einstein summation convention" is a slightly more primitive version of this graphical tensor notation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slight nit-pick, but matrix multiplication is not exclusively a contraction, but rather a contraction on the tensor product of the two matrices. See the next paragraph for why this is concerning.

I find this notation great for simple applications, but potentially unwieldy for dim > 2\. For instance, how would I represent the tensor (or outer) product of two matrices? the inputs would be two circles with two lines attached to each, the result would need to be a single circle with four lines attached. The natural attempt would be something like:

      a    - o -
          /    /
         |    /
         \   |
      ab  ---o---
             |   \
            /    |
           /    /
      b    - o -

But I suspect the above diagram isn't correct because there are no "open" indices at the end of this. Rather, this diagram seems to represent the contraction of a 4D tensor with 2, 2D tensors.

It seems we we would need a way of connecting circles _without_ implying a contraction of a particular index.

Anyone know how to annotate the outer product of two matrices in this diagrammatic convention?

<comment><USER6> A tensor product of two matrices is just this, with 4 loose ends:

        ---A---
        ---B---

A_ab B_cd = (A⊗B)_acbd. If a,c=1...N then you can think of (ac) as being an index with N^2 possible values, which is what the double line now means... if you like, you may compact it a bit:

        ===(A⊗B)===

<comment><USER5> But how am I supposed to know that AB is one mathematical object here instead of the 2 separate objects A, B? My point is that there should be a graphical way other than "put them arbitrarily close" to link them together

I prefer your second notation, with the tensor product happening in parenthesis, but it kind of defeats the point of the graphical nature of the notation if we need to explictly write the tensor product I think..

<comment><USER7> Speaking as someone who uses this tensor notation quite a lot: putting multiple objects into the same diagram _is_ what a tensor product is, and a great thing about the notation is that it reveals that a tensor product of two matrices is not an essential object in itself.

If you wish, you can draw a circle around A and B to "factor out" that part of the diagram as a sub tensor product. Here might be a way to show that matrix multiplication is both "tensor product then contract" and "function composition": [https://imgur.com/tcCycYj.png](https://imgur.com/tcCycYj.png) (though I didn't give this gray-circle notation much thought).

Think about this: how is it in a product abcd of plain old numbers am I supposed to see the mathematical object ad without putting them arbitrarily close together? (Well, in standard notation, you _do_ put them close together and write (ad)bc or something.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The computer graphics pioneer Jim Blinn has a nice lecture on tensor diagrams: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40TdlWURkS8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40TdlWURkS8)

<comment><USER9> [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2002/01/UsingTensorDiagrams.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> To those interested in machine learning, this idea naturally leads to "deep tensor networks" that are neural networks that can operate on and with high order tensors. I wrote a (non-rigorous) blog post about this: [http://outlace.com/TensorNets1.html](http://outlace.com/TensorNets1.html)

<comment><USER11> excellent post, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How would one write a cross-product with that?

Using two vectors and the epsilon tensor (Levi-Chivita-symbol), I guess?

 _Edit:_ So like this: two circles with one connection each as input, i.e. vectors (a and b), and a tensor with three connections, leaving one, meaning the result will be a vector again.

      a  o
          \
           o -    (-o c)
          /
      b  o

Multiplying with another vector c gives the parallelepipedial product (a x b) c, a scalar (also = det(a,b,c)).

Cool :)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, cross product is the determinant with "one strand bent back."

If you take a 3-regular planar graph and put the determinant/Levi-Civita tensor on each vertex, you get plus-or-minus the number of edge-3-colorings of that graph. The four-color theorem is merely to show this tensor contraction is always non-zero :-) (Nobody's managed to prove it this way, yet.)

Here are some notes showing how to contract two Levi-Civita symbols together graphically: [https://imgur.com/HmaLSaB.png](https://imgur.com/HmaLSaB.png)

This is in Penrose's 1971 paper ("Applications of negative-dimensional tensors"). He went on to notice that you can do a "puff-up-and-contract" construction to completely get rid of all the Levi-Civita tensors: [https://imgur.com/eK9ZCkc.png](https://imgur.com/eK9ZCkc.png)

From here, he recognized that this sort of tensor network on 3-dimensional space was equivalent to an abstract tensor network on "(-2)-dimensional space", where there is an identity that let him remove all the places the strings cross [https://imgur.com/65z0zov.png](https://imgur.com/65z0zov.png) (This element placed at each edge in (-2)-dimensional space is known as the "second Jones-Wenzl projector for the Temperley-Lieb algebra.")

From a more recent point of view, what he did was find a graphical way to go from an SO(3) tensor network to an SL(2) tensor network (which should be possible since both Lie groups are isomorphic).

<comment><USER12> > From a more recent point of view, what he did was find a graphical way to go > from an SO(3) tensor network to an SL(2) tensor network (which should be > possible since both Lie groups are isomorphic).

Locally isomorphic, but not isomorphic: SL(2) is the simply connected double cover Spin(3) of SO(3). As you probably know, the non-simply-connectedness of SO(3) is what's witnessed by Dirac's belt trick ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick)).

<comment><USER7> Thanks, that's right. (I had the Lie algebras in mind with that statement. The Lie brackets are placed at the vertices in the construction.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The other time, during a discussion about Feynman diagrams ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19909542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19909542)) I mentioned some resources related to tensor diagrams ([https://medium.com/@pmigdal/in-the-topic-of-diagrams-i- did-w...](https://medium.com/@pmigdal/in-the-topic-of-diagrams-i-did-write-a- review-simple-diagrams-of-convoluted-neural-networks-6418a63f9281)). Happy this topic gets more mainstream, and this blog post by Tai-Danae Bradley is pure gold!

Practical things: who want to co-write a library (JS I guess) for drawing such tensor diagrams? I think it has a lot of potential for representing formulae, form Markov Chains, through Quantum Computing to Deep Learning!

</comment><comment><USER14> What bothers me about this is, all indices are not the same. You could draw a line connecting a 5-dimensional index to a 3-dimensional one. There should be some way of separating incompatible indices. Granted this is less of an issue for physics where virtually every index goes from 0 to 3 inclusive - <USER2> some go from 1 to 3. Conventionally, this is dealt with by using Greek letters for 4-vectors and regular letters for 3-vectors.

<comment><USER15> You put labels on lines. For example the diagram here works like that:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-j_symbol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-j_symbol)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am sad to bring sad tidings but... This is very beautiful, it just puts the burden of the proof on a more abstract setting, which may be more difficult to grasp.

(This is just a comment on the "graphical proofs", they are beautiful but they cannot be "proofs" unless you provide the background).

<comment><USER4> It's turtles all the way down:

[https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/2015/06/09/matrices- diagr...](https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/2015/06/09/matrices- diagrammatically/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In many different areas of scientific investigation, purely diagrammatic expressions have begun to be used as mathematical substitutes for the traditional symbolic expressions. These new languages reflect clear operational concepts such as 'systems' and 'processes', and 'wires' are used to represent information flow. Composition is built-in, as the act of connecting wires together. These diagrams are more intuitive, and easier to manipulate, than conventional symbolic models of reasoning.

Examples of areas in which these techniques are being used include logic, for the study of propositions and deductions [43]; physics, for the study of space and spacetime [8, 32]; linguistics, to model the interaction of words within a sentence [21]; knowledge, to represent information and belief revision [22]; and computation, for the study of data and computer programs [1, 10]. These diagrams have been provided with a rigorous underpinning using category theory, a powerful branch of mathematics which relates these diagrammatic theories to algebraic structures. More deeply, this approach can also be applied to the study of diagrammatic theories themselves [12, 33]. As such, it is its own 'metatheory'. One major goal of the project will be to understand to what extent this can serve as a foundation for mathematics itself, as a replacement for set theory. To work towards this, one goal will be to understand how various mathematical structures can be defined from this perspective, a rich line of enquiry for which some answers are already known, but much more is left to still be discovered. An interesting feature of categorical approaches to foundations is that standard limitative theorems, such as the incompleteness theorem of Godel, are no longer set in stone [7, 39]; instead, they become malleable, and can be directly ¨ controlled by changing the categorical universe in which one works.

Switching to the field of artificial intelligence and automation — perhaps, so it seems, a world away from the abstraction of higher mathematics — the diagrammatic categories themselves have been implemented as the actual language and deduction mechanism of automated reasoning software packages. These tools make it possible to automatically explore the theories formulated in the diagrammatic language. For the case of the abstract mathematical expressions, the package quantomatic, currently in development at the Computing Laboratory at the University of Oxford, performs this function. For the particular case of diagrammatic models of language and meaning, parsers and tools for corpus exploration are currently under development.

The study of each of these 'diagrammatic theories', each modelling a separate part of cognitive, physical, or mathematical reality, are currently separate. Our grand vision is to develop a fully integrated framework, in which all of the above can be comprehended and dealt with together. This would be a foundation for mathematics, not in isolation but in direct relation to the cognitive and physical worlds; not only as an exercise in abstract thought, but directly implemented computationally, with tools available for automatic calculation and deduction. The unique perspective given by categorical foundations on Godel-style theorems will allow their relevance to cognition to be rigorously studied. The strong mathematical similarities between the diagrammatic techniques used in these different fields, which have only recently begun to be appreciated, provides a good impetus for this research programme.

Source: An integrated diagrammatic universe for knowledge, language and artificial reasoning. Abramsky & Coecke, Oxford.

[http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/bob.coecke/JTFCats.pdf](http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/bob.coecke/JTFCats.pdf)

<comment><USER18> In what sense do they mean "begun", as in, that this is a new concept? Some of their citations go back to the 60's and 70's. Engineers have been using block diagrams for.. how long? Venn diagrams were invented in 1880 according to Wikipedia. It doesn't strike me that the use of visual languages in mathematics is particularly new.

<comment><USER19> I think that they mean in this source this /particular/ way of diagrammatic reasoning, as pioneered by Coecke, who literally wrote the book on it ([http://www.cambridge.org/gb/pqp](http://www.cambridge.org/gb/pqp)), although very similar diagrammatic reasoning has been used for some time in Category Theory through string diagrams ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_diagram)).

<comment><USER17> I think the approach is different. String diagrams is a small DSL while the above is intended to be more foundational and be used to bootstrap and translate between various specific diagrammatic theories (including String diagrams).

> The study of each of these 'diagrammatic theories', each modelling a > separate part of cognitive, physical, or mathematical reality, are currently > separate. Our grand vision is to develop a fully integrated framework, in > which all of the above can be comprehended and dealt with together.

> More deeply, this approach can also be applied to the study of diagrammatic > theories themselves [12, 33]. As such, it is its own 'metatheory'. One major > goal of the project will be to understand to what extent this can serve as a > foundation for mathematics itself, as a replacement for set theory.

Also, as an ironic side note in relation with the article, some of the diagrammatic theories that have been elaborated by this group include diagrams that contain (and not just represent) matrices. I don't know why I'm commenting in this thread, I don't understand anything in these papers, I just know it describes what I see, i.e. the great universal diagram. Don't you see it ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> here are some pages that might be relevant

[https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/tensor+network](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/tensor+network) [https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/string+diagram](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/string+diagram)</comment>


Lack of sleep alters human gene activity  - <AUTHOR> http://surrey.ac.uk/mediacentre/press/2013/98567_lack_of_sleep_alters_human_gene_activity.htm <comment><USER2> Already posted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5284832>

<comment><USER3> Another mystery of how a story can stay on the front page for hours with one comment while others drop off more quickly with active discussion happening. I know it's been discussed before, but sometimes I'm very confused about the ranking of stories.

<comment><USER4> Number of comments is not important at all, just number of upvotes.

Stories drop of quickly if they get flagged. It also depends on the amount of competition.</comment></comment></comment>


Oral history of electrical engineer Robert P. Colwell [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://newsletter.sigmicro.org/sigmicro-oral-history-transcripts/Bob-Colwell-Transcript.pdf <comment><USER2> I can't tell you all the ways this was a great read for me. Some of it is performance, some of it is politics, some of it crazy history in $company. It's a great read.</comment>