VertexRed

It's hard accurately measure how many users that are actively blocking ads, but it's estimated that nearly a third of all computers are currently blocking ads [1]. This is a big number and it's steadily growing.

There is no doubt that this has affected the revenue for website owners negatively regardless of the size of the website. This could be damaging the web, especially for the smaller sites that receive less traffic. It's likely that we would see an increase in quality and variety of content across the web if it was more rewarding.

It's understandable that users don't want to be bombarded with ads or tracked across the web, but there should be a global list with acceptable and simple ads (banner or animation and a link) that should be enforced by all ad blockers and controlled by each add-on platform.

One might argue that AdBlock Plus implemented a list of "acceptable ads", but this is a bizarre scheme made to generate ridiculous amounts for their organization with the explanation that the fee is set due to the "significant effort" of maintaining the whitelist [2].

Do you think that ad blockers are reducing the quality of the web and should they be limited?

1: https://www.globalwebindex.com/reports/global-ad-blocking-behavior

2: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements

This has to be one of the largest (and personally the most interesting) IT myths out there. I have my own belief of what happened (which I might share later), but I'm really interested in reading what others believe went on and how (or if) he was able to actually reduce a full movie down to a fraction of its size.

Brief summary for those who haven't heard of him: Sloot claimed to have invented a system that was able to compress a full digital movie down to 8 KB which he privately demonstrated to different groups several times. He was even in contact with Roel Pieper who was Philips CTO at the time and just before they were about to go big, he passes away.

Jan Sloot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot

I mainly work with the backend, but years ago when I first started I used to take care of the frontend too due to my small budget (designing logos, user interfaces in jQuery and just designing websites in general).

Now I've started working on a new side project and I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of work that I've put into the design so I'm looking for a frontend developer that I can regularly work with.

I've tried hiring designers many times in the past, but I've never been satisfied with the results. When someone is a part of the project and really puts their heart and soul into it then the result really improves so I thought I'd try something different for this project.

So to the question; does anyone have any good advice on where can I find a frontend developer that wants to partner up and work together?

Am I the only one that gets annoyed by varying methods used to contact API servers (XML-RPC, SOAP, REST...), not to mention that the output is usually in XML or JSON?

What's wrong with having RESTful APIs, have all the API examples/demos use cURL (I've yet to find a case where a cURL lacks a function for HTTP[s] requests) and finally have all the output in JSON?

Now this might be an unpopular opinion so feel free to shower me in downvotes.