Our team at Marbled Fennec Networks has noticed a rather disturbing trend in which each day that goes by, the internet becomes more and more centralized and commercialized. If you search for “types of running sneakers” or “kinds of fish to keep as pets” or really any terms these days; you will notice that the ads on websites you visit for a few hours to a few days after will show you ads related to the content you have been interacting with.
Some of this really feels off putting and kind of like we are being watched across our daily lives when it comes to our internet activities. Ad agencies track information such your search habits, browsing paths, types of videos you watch and the people you interact with. They then use this information to build a advertising profile of sorts that follows you around the web, shoving ads in your face, trying to get you to part with your money for some new product or fad.
For the bigger projects that need the income from ad placement, we can somewhat understand running ads as long as they are not of the tracking variety and are not intrusive to the browsing or application use experience. Projects should be able to make some income to support their operations and that is okay, as long as it is performed respectfully when it comes to their visitors and users.
However, we at Marbled Fennec Networks take a dim view on any online advertising due to the amount of ads in our daily lives. We hear them on the radio, see them on the TV, YouTube shoves ads in our faces before during and after each video we watch. In our region, you can’t even go to a bus stop without seeing an ad either on the bus itself or as some digital signage on the bus stop. The over commercialization of our lives, and by extent the internet, is becoming a problem that is driving users and would be visitors away from various avenues of life, both online and in real life. And we aren’t saying that ads should be banned, just that they should be less. They should be a smaller part of the information that we take in and process. People should be treated as people and not just another wallet for some company or group to try and siphon money out of.
With the above being said, the team at Marbled Fennec Networks takes the position that we will never run commercial ads on our website. Never. And that choice might place financial pressure on us over time as the cost to operate our network changes and the computer network landscape evolves. But we believe that people should have a place to relax, absorb the content they came for, socialize with their peers and not be bothered by advertisements. Our project will never serve a commercial ad from our infrastructure, that is a final and set in stone requirement for us to operate going into the future. (For those reading and going “Uh oh…”, you can stop worrying. We will not filter ads or other content from being viewed by our connected users unless we are asked to do so via a support ticket from their account. Marbled Fennec Networks still aims to be a neutral carrier as much as possible.)
As as July 23rd, 2024:
The only types of ads that are allowed to be shown in games that we host, events that we sponsor or our website(s) are ads that promote other open source projects, in game events that our community is hosting or ads for projects that our members are working on. As it stands, under current leadership, we are taking a very blatant “no ads within reason” policy. To us, the only reasonable ads are those that support our community’s interest and visions; and do not pester the viewer or user about spending money on some random product.
The stance on ads extends to our project members and guest as well. Within the next few weeks, there will be changes pushed to our project policies that reflect the above stance. But the quick view of it is as follows:
- Project leaders, volunteer staff, project members and guest shall not host or serve ads of a commercial nature nor ads that are not related to their project at hand.
- Project members and guest should keep ads to respectful limitations such only showing at the bottom of the page or one single non-moving ad in the side bar.
- Services, games, applications and websites hosted on the network run by Marbled Fennec Networks are forbidden from display, sharing, serving or otherwise distributing commercial ads of any nature.
Marbled Fennec Networks should be a place that people can come to enjoy their time spent here, free of the over commercialization that has become the internet as a whole. Our team will do our best to hold on to that vision for as long as the project is in operation. We know we need income to support the project, but shoving unwanted ads in the faces of our users is not the answer to this problem. There are other ways.