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I’ve never used ad blockers, despite being around for the whole history of the web. When I find a site to have obnoxious ads on it, I stop going to that site. That’s the only way to truly give clear feedback to any site that its ad policy has become a problem.
On top of that I feel like if a site has unintrusive, clearly labeled ads and I enjoy that site’s content then I want to support the site.
My point being; AdBlock has always been a crappy solution. The solution to FaceBook is delete your FaceBook account. The ads are hardly the worst thing about that site.
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It’s very hard to have “clearly labeled ads” simply because they don’t pay very well – Google pays something miserable, such that if you reach a third of americans you will gross only about $5k.
If I had an ad exchange where you could buy yourself, would you do it? Publishers could do the simple thing of placing an ad unit, but you could buy yourself and serve yourself a white/blank ad, thereby personally contributing to the publisher while still avoiding any advertising – but would you do it? I’ve been doing this for a while, but if I turned it into a product where you gave me your credit card, would you do it?
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The problem is content makers are by and large very lazy and outsource their ad selling to Google. Then Google takes a cut of the revenue, and has such a large market that your site’s views aren’t worth anything.
I have always been of the mind that content creators/publishers should sell their own ad space. They will show more relevant ads to their customers and get more revenue from it. If you let Google or some other ad network do it for you and take a cut, then yeah your ad revenue is going to stink.
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I don’t think “the problem” is any one thing. Thinking that this is a simple problem leads people to think there needs to be a simple solution.
I also don’t think publishers need to get more creative with their ad sales: I’d rather they produce better content. When a publisher gets too intimate with their sponsor, we tend to get really confusing content.
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What kind of coverage do you get bidding on an exchange?
I think the hard thing about turning something like this into a product is that it won’t work for reservations or networks that don’t get their demand off an exchange and it will be hard to communicate that distinction to users.
Google Contributor works similarly but its hard to justify paying money for something that is essentially just a worse version of Adblock Plus.
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Is anyone else bothered by the use of the term ricing? As far as I know it is co-opting the automotive term which has racist origins.
If somebody brings up ricing and linux, I have to think of this old site making fun of gentoo users w/o a clue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080830031318/http://funroll-loops.info/
This thread got pretty ugly. It started out good talking about the history of the term and what it means to people but has sunk into personal attacks. If someone would like to cite academic sources on the history of the term in tech or racing, go ahead, but otherwise we’ve stopped adding new information and this thread is done. Please don’t post further comments.
I’m also going to delete the comments with personal attacks. Please don’t do this. If you’re right, being mean doesn’t make you more right. Nobody has ever taken incoming vitriol and abuse are a sign that someone must really be worth listening to and seriously considering, and they’re not appropriate here.
Tagging so everyone in the thread sees this: @fimad @fs111 @voronoipotato @djsumdog @mjtorn @nebkor @brendes @btaitelb @dz @vhodges @leolambda
Sorry, I missed this because I was writing the post and went out to the food truck. honest mistake, wasn’t trying to be a butt. I got a little reactionary there, it won’t happen again.
Let’s etch that in bronze and hang that over every discussion area on the Internet, please.
Exactly.
Hmm, I didn’t know about that at all. Would be nice to have a better term. Customization seems too general.
“Tweaking” seems to capture it pretty well.
I considered that, but “tweaking” also means being high on stimulants, which is just common enough in the hacker community that I think it would be confusing.
Perhaps modding, but that’s already a massively overloaded term: game modding, hardware modding, etc.
I’m inclined to use “dotting”, as in “dotfile”, but also with the connotation of meticulousness (as in “dotting i’s and crossing t’s”. Its alternate definitions are pretty tame, as well.
Dotting sounds what a dotard does, but I guess that’d be “doting”.
Yeah, good point. I like “styling”.
tuning, maybe?
That looks more apropriate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuning
“Fine tuning a computer environment” could be your job. “Like car tuning but for software” would be the hobby.
from other communities: Hot Rodding (cars - more Chip Foose than useless spoilers on the back) and Modding (computer cases)
Given that there’s a lot of style at work, maybe “peacocking”, spiffing up”, “turning out”, something riffing on fashion.
It’s like styling, but like even more so. Stylizing?
Styling is good, yeah. “Stylize” actually means “to depict or treat in a mannered and nonrealistic style”, so I don’t think it’s really applicable here.
I had never seen it used in the Linux desktop. The term ricer may not have the same racist meanings as before but two things are common about ricers in my area:
My personal view is that, even when a word has no racist origins, if there is a specific ethnicity that it applies to, it will quickly become a racist word anyway. Luckily there are more and more white dudes who bought their first car and became a ricer 🍚
My perspective is exactly the opposite – I have never heard this term in connection to cars, just with *nix customization, especially in and around the Linux/Unix community. In over 4 years I’ve never heard anyone use it in any other context, nor was I in any sense aware that it had this other meaning. And I would suppose that most people, especially non-car enthusiasts like me would have probably never found out, nor use the term with this connotation.
All in all, it seems like a fantastic starting point for a horrible confusion…
Yes, and yes. :( . It’s unfortunate when a racist term becomes so normalized that it’s just vernacular. Then the people who want to use it xenophobically basically get to do so and nobody speaks up because it’s just a word everyone uses. The term in guns is “Tacticool”. Perhaps there’s a good word for this that is less regressive and a little more general.
It doesn’t have racist origins; or at least not in the context we used it in back when I was in various SCCA and use to race. A ricer is just someone who adds all kinds of shit to their car. Each sticker adds 2hp. The K&N air filter adds 10hp. Big cardboard wing adds 90hp. Fart can exhaust adds 30hp. That carbon fibre hood? 120hp right there.
Most ricers were white. They were just kids who didn’t know dick about cars and pretended they did. They’d fill the parking lot and hang out in their riced out Hondas while the rest of us raced. I mean if you stretch, some people might trace ricer back to the term wigger referring to white people enacting black culture.
Ricers had nothing to do with race and more to do with shitty car mods like these: https://www.reddit.com/r/Shitty_Car_Mods/
Ricer aka rice burner kinda does though because it was about japanese cars. Yes this is where the term comes from and no I’m not shitting you.
I’ll be honest terms like wigger are also regressive. I’m not telling you how to speak or trying to say this is what you meant by it. Obviously you can use a word with racist or ethnocentric origins non-racistly. Just keep in mind that not everyone who uses it is using it the way you’re using it. Also keep in mind that someone who sees you using it might think you have it out for a specific ethnicity until they get to know you a bit better.
Frankly the title evokes a “Yikes” from me but in a “Yikes they don’t even know how bad that sounds” way. Like people who know you will probably go “Oh but that’s djsumdog, he doesn’t mean it in a racist way”, but wow it is just a really bad idea to lead with a racially loaded term in your article title to the general public.
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Someone can be unaware of how racist language affects thoughts and opinions without “being a racist”. Being said yea just because you heard the term from a person of the affected group does not mean it’s cool to say. Case in point if you dropped the n-word because you saw a black person doing it you’d probably get some frowns.
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I think that’s a really good definition of a microaggression, a term that people don’t knowingly use offensively, but which has offensive origins and still conveys that offensiveness to some.
Growing up, I’d use the term jip [sic] all the time as a synonym for screwing someone over in a deal. I actually thought it was less offensive to say than to say screw. Then I learned that the word has racist origins about stereotypes for Gypsies, so I went through the process that I think a lot of us go through. At first I was defensive because there was a discongruity in my reality between how I saw myself and how others might see me, so I rationalized that the word didn’t really mean that any more. And if someone happened to be offended by it, they were probably just being overly sensitive and should get a thicker skin.
But over time, I realized I had the choice when using words, and that it’s not up to me to dictate how others should feel. So I slowly started correcting myself, because when given the choice, I’d rather not use words that offend a group of people, especially when I’m not part of that group.
I didn’t think you meant that, sorry I was responding to the intense reaction to your post. Yeah I do think that’s the case. The root problem is like when you use a word that has racist origins, and a racist takes it as like “Ah they also hate the japs” validation for their racist attitudes. Which is bad. It also sucks because words that are that way primarily the racists, and the marginalized know what it means because they grew up in an environment where the intention behind the origin was more clear.
I hope you understand I do not agree with painting you as a bad guy simply because you grew up in an area where a word was the norm and you didn’t see harm with it. Doesn’t mean there isn’t harm? It just means it was the norm and you were used to it and it would be exceptional for you to escape that norm, and not the default expectation. At least you’re not shutting down the discussion.
Suffice to say, normal people have likely forgotten it, racists remember these things with a death grip and will use it to dehumanize people as much as physically possible.
You quoted it yourself: it’s pejorative, not racist. The difference is significant, yet the whole point is moot, because so few people are neurotic about political correctness in slang etymology[citation needed]
Things can be both pejorative and racist? Many racist things are pejorative. The term is racist because it uses East Asian products as a way to describe inferiority. To put in in a more personal way it would be like me saying “oh that’s snake code” as a pejorative for python programmers.It tries to illogically assert that since you’ve seen a python programmer make bad code, that a python programmer can never write good code. This is of course is horseshit, and is bigoted against python programmers. I’m merely trying to dislodge bullshit like that from the public consciousness.
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There’s nothing wrong with LeoLambda’s article, I liked it too. The title gave me a yikes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re a bad person it probably just means they either didn’t know about the origin of the word, or they knew about it but thought it wasn’t used that way anymore. I also like talking about culture, it doesn’t mean I’m virtue signaling. Though frankly I think you are virtue signalling to the pc-panic crew. You basically pooped your pants when you read the word racist like christ himself was being crucified. Exploring alternative words that are less racist isn’t virtue signalling it’s called not being actively hostile to an entire demographic for no reason.
Potentially ironically, “hysterical” has sexist origins.
This whole conversation is a little frustrating to me. I hope @mjtorn and @brendes are just reading past what’s being said to them, due to defensiveness and confirmation bias. The responses to their comments aren’t being worded to tiptoe around their feelings, which is also pretty understandable—these conversations are an emotional investment, and there are lots of aggressive racists out there who will throw that investment back in your face. I don’t really have a solution, but I think the situation is regrettable. The path to realization that subtle racism is everywhere always seems to involve an epiphany after the fact, not careful reading and understanding of the arguments.
From my experience it is probably racist. Case in point: In Edmonton they call riced cars ‘Nip’d up’ (racial slang for Japanese) since it would be mostly Asian drivers doing the mods.