There’s a bit of a melt down going on in the Piano Forum at PW right now. There was a huge uproar when new, very ETA intrusive ads started taking over the site. This naturally led to some threads about it, and someone made a new site in case people wanted to leave PW. That much was fine, but one of the moderators, Gombessa, I guess was promoting use of ad blockers, so the new site owners not only removed him as moderator, but also completely banned him from the site. People are up in arms about it and suddenly a whole bunch of people have joined the new site.
I have not been following PW closely, but I have noticed the proliferation of ads. Very annoying, as they pop up in the middle of threads and elsewhere.
I’m beginning to see the virtue of paid sites.
By the way, SK, instead of “instructive” in your first sentence, I’m sure you meant “intrusive.”
-------------------------------- “It's hard to win an argument with a smart person. It's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person." -- Bill Murray
Posts: 13890 | Location: The outer burrows | Registered: 27 April 2005
Some discussion about VerticalScope on another forum. Would explain a lot.
quote:
Another thing you should read about VS. It isn't a forum platform. It's a data-collecting agency that uses the forum as a front to generate traffic. Read the privacy policy and user agreements. Once you log in, it has permission to access your memory, HD, browser history, and scan your network for its configuration. You also have zero rights to what you publish as it instantly becomes copyrighted property of VS. Technically, if you cross post something on a VS forum, and then copy and paste it here, you have committed a federal crime. Once you agreed to that checkbox, you also gave up your right to legal recourse. If they want to take legal action against you, you have agreed that you can't use the courts, you have to use arbitration.... THEIR arbitration to settle. Clicking a checkbox on VS more or less signs away every right you have pertaining to your activity on that site.
It's a money and data farm. You log in, it scans your everythings, and populates the page with ad banners which make them money. Then later they take the data they've collected and sell it. The average human generates something like $23 worth of saleable data every day. They're not offering you a forum, they're letting you offer up your data for sale.
It should be noted that many forums do this, just not as purposefully as VS does. Back in the day, VBulletin caught on to the trick of offering a product (a forum platform) that they could monetize. VS is a from-scratch, ground-up data mining operation that later had the smart idea of making forum platforms as a way to get traffic. In the case of VB, their purpose was to offer a platform and they modestly monetized it. In the case of VS, they wanted to get in the data/ad game and they made a forum as a vehicle to do it.
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I think the idea behind buying up these forums is to optimize them such that when people search for a certain topic like YZ125 fork oil or similar, the first hit will be one of their forums, and when you visit them you'll get hammered with advertising. Regular forum users are not what they're interested in, so if people leave en masse, they don't care. As long as they get (ideally) non member visits.
So VS doesn't care if all the current members leave. They'll get traffic from non-members looking for piano info. Those visits will generate revenue from the ads.
-------------------------------- When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
Posts: 38223 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
By the way, SK, instead of “instructive” in your first sentence, I’m sure you meant “intrusive.”
I did indeed! . Autocorrect has gotten increasingly bad these days, esp in terms of correctly something I typed that was spelled correctly, but auto correct changes it it to some other word. -_-
But the current problem/reaction isn’t really at the ads anymore, although that’s still a thing that people hate.
It’s the banning of Gombessa that has everyone so up in arms.
I think they’ve finally figured out what it means to have the site run by someone who only cares about money rather than being run by someone who cares about pianos.
I think they’ve finally figured out what it means to have the site run by someone who only cares about money rather than being run by someone who cares about pianos.
Lot of that going around.
-------------------------------- Life is short. Play with your dog.
Jodi
