mirror of
https://github.com/opsxcq/mirror-textfiles.com.git
synced 2025-08-10 17:04:13 +02:00
144 lines
8.6 KiB
HTML
144 lines
8.6 KiB
HTML
<HTML>
|
|
<TITLE>T E X T F I L E S</TITLE>
|
|
<BODY BGCOLOR="#000000">
|
|
<FONT FACE="Courier New" COLOR="#00FF00">
|
|
<B>WHY IS THERE NO ADVERTISING ON TEXTFILES.COM?</B>
|
|
<P>
|
|
I thought I'd write a little bit about the idea of advertising on the Internet,
|
|
since the subject has been coming up more and more wherever I happen to browse
|
|
(i.e. "The End of Free", "The Free Ride is Over", "Pop-ups Now Rule the Web",
|
|
etc.) and I figure there's no harm in giving my opinion. If you're the kind of
|
|
person who doesn't really want to hear the opinion of the person running a site
|
|
like this, I entirely understand and you can stop reading with no guilt whatsoever.
|
|
<P>
|
|
I essentially abandoned BBSes for the Internet around 1989, still using a few
|
|
local boards but spending the vast majority of my time on the (relatively) small
|
|
number of attractions on the Internet. I know this is hard to believe now, but
|
|
the Internet offered an amazingly educated audience and set of users who could
|
|
be depended on to post some really thought-provoking writing and otherwise
|
|
communicate in a forward fashion. Jerks and haymakers were, even within their
|
|
own contexts, amusing and complicated figures in themselves; Compare Batman's
|
|
"The Riddler" to, say, a teenager with a pistol.
|
|
<P>
|
|
Advertising in these early days was pretty much forbidden; as the Internet was
|
|
primarily the province of non-commercial entities (schools, government) any
|
|
attempts to put commercials or otherwise inject advertising into the Internet
|
|
could get you quite a bit of wrath and in some cases actual phone calls to the
|
|
entity providing you your connection, ending in a quick cut-off.
|
|
<P>
|
|
Like everyone else, I was very excited when I brought up a Mosaic Browser in
|
|
1993 and saw this "all-in-one" experience we now call the World Wide Web (WWW).
|
|
It seemed the logical conclusion for similar technologies that had been
|
|
appearing before (Gopher, WAIS, telnet) and I'm happy to say that along with
|
|
a few friends, I helped bring a really nice website up and running in 1993
|
|
(<A HREF="http://www.tim.org">http://www.tim.org</A>).
|
|
<P>
|
|
What I'm saying is, I've been at this a very long time. I have the history to
|
|
pull from, and I have the experiences that I remember from over a decade ago
|
|
to compare to what we have now. I'm not coming into the whole goulash within
|
|
the past few years and suddenly making major pronouncements. So here goes.
|
|
<P>
|
|
It took a while, I'll grant that, but using the Internet (and by that I mean
|
|
web-browsing) has become a fairly combative experience. Your websites are
|
|
choked (and in some cases overrun) with advertising. Your mail accounts are
|
|
filled to the brim with unsolicted offers of sex and mortgages and hundreds
|
|
of consumer goods. You are sometimes misled by search engines directly into
|
|
porno sites that sieze your browser and change your bookmarks. Pop-up ads are
|
|
now filled with sound and graphics and demand your acknowledgement before you
|
|
can make a single move on a website.
|
|
<P>
|
|
Essentially, you are no longer a valued part of the entire exchange: You are
|
|
a Click Monkey, a mindless automaton attempting to retrieve content that may
|
|
not even exist, like a toy robot running into a staircase and pitifully
|
|
whirring against the first step.
|
|
<P>
|
|
While most webmasters will not admit this to your face, many of them have
|
|
dangerously bought into the Lexicon of Marketing, where you measure the
|
|
success of your website by the number of people who connect and stare at
|
|
your ads, bringing in pennies with every click-through. In this backwards
|
|
world the content is besides the point except as a means to keep you on
|
|
the site, and the meaning of the site is pushed ever backwards to get the
|
|
audience to walk further down the aisles past screeching banners and
|
|
demanding buttons. Marketing turns a website into a platform for an
|
|
ever-rotating cachet of uncaring Masters, each only interested in shoving
|
|
their carefully-crafted "purchase" message down your throat.
|
|
<P>
|
|
Marketing's allure is itself very attractive; this is why otherwise bright and
|
|
intelligent teenagers choose to major in it and learn how to laser-focus their
|
|
abilities to make a populace want something it previously didn't know about.
|
|
Why they go into such a dismal landscape of subtle treachery and misdirection
|
|
is kind of hard to understand from the outside; at a stretch one could convince
|
|
yourself that the messages that you will drill into the minds of children and
|
|
the inattentive will make the world better... but this is almost never the
|
|
case. Instead, you will use a paintbox of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and sexual
|
|
tension to bring your client's message to the forefront of the minds of
|
|
potential customers the world over. There are barely words to descibe how low
|
|
you are.
|
|
<P>
|
|
It was inevitable that Marketers would come to the Internet after it opened
|
|
to commercial interests; only Marketers promise revenue based on lack of
|
|
effort. That is, all you have to do is candy-coat your website with a number
|
|
of alluring banners and the money will come to you, pulling you out of your
|
|
own personal financial swamp. Wealth or at least a humble self-sustaining
|
|
income will be yours for the mere cost of a few inches of your website. This
|
|
is a very, very powerful message, if you don't notice the Pimp behind it.
|
|
<P>
|
|
At this point, I'll mention what you've already figured out: textfiles.com
|
|
doesn't have advertising. It doesn't use banners, it doesn't use pop-ups, it
|
|
doesn't harvest your e-mail address and spam you, and it certainly doesn't
|
|
make you click though a number of "read this" pages to get to the content.
|
|
It's all there, quite freely available, easy to download and get to. I wish
|
|
I could say that this site was the norm, and it's rapidly becoming obvious
|
|
that it is not.
|
|
<P>
|
|
None of my mirrors (bless them) contain advertising on their textfiles.com
|
|
sites either; once they do, they're not listed as mirrors anymore. On several
|
|
occasions I have been offered a mirror site, if I just allow them to cake their
|
|
fetid banners all over the content. When I say no, that's just not going to
|
|
happen, I get back the one thing that truly angers me: The Indignation.
|
|
<P>
|
|
I understand disappointment that this potential new "revenue stream" will not
|
|
be available to exploit. I expect a sort of dumbfounded silence at why I am
|
|
literately throwing away all this glorious green money. But I do not understand
|
|
that segment of the population who think that the slathering of advertising
|
|
is doing anyone a favor, and who come back at me with righteous jabs at my
|
|
luddite-esque reluctance to turn textfiles.com into an advertisement for
|
|
low-cost server hosting or a pointer to an endless landscape of vaginas.
|
|
In some cases, I have recieved insulting, critical paragraphs from people who
|
|
I've turned down, telling me to "get with it" and join the "real world".
|
|
<P>
|
|
Indignation, to me, betrays a complete lack of understanding of the reason
|
|
that websites were created in the first place: to provide content. These are
|
|
the same minds that put billboards over urinals and in hospital waiting
|
|
rooms, who coat subway cars and school hallways with posters, who see no
|
|
issues with DVD discs that force you to watch a logo every time they're
|
|
inserted or with "non-commercial" public radio that begin every show with
|
|
five minutes of who the show was brought to you by. They look at every spare
|
|
moment of life as a potential to sell you a product. Every square inch of
|
|
unused space is a place where an ad should be. Every last bit of meaning in
|
|
the world should be "presented by" a corporate entity.
|
|
<P>
|
|
Advertising does nobody a favor. They turn everything into a sales pitch, they
|
|
present glossed-over facts and figures to convince you their goals are the
|
|
logical conclusion, and they will always sacrifice unpopular ideas and
|
|
uncomfortable truths if it increases accessibility. All-ages blandness will
|
|
always triumph over messy introspection and the questioning of meaning, in
|
|
their book. It is a sad, colorless world they prefer, with the only color
|
|
coming from their latest campaign. I hate everything they stand for.
|
|
<P>
|
|
Textfiles.com is free: free of cost, free of restrictions, and free of any
|
|
advertising. I am not paid by anyone to say anything. I am not in the employ
|
|
of some firm using me to get "clickthroughs" or "sticky eyeballs" or whatever
|
|
the term is this week. I am here to give you the history of the BBS and to
|
|
take the site in whatever directions branch from that. I am having a glorious
|
|
time doing it, too.
|
|
<P>
|
|
The site costs me hundreds of dollars a month to run. I consider it the best
|
|
spent money in my entire life.
|
|
<P>
|
|
- Jason Scott<BR>
|
|
August 21, 2002
|
|
<P>
|
|
</BODY>
|
|
</HTML>
|