Revolutionary paradigm shift in hosting industry?

So with Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr giving credits to customers, AWS and Openshift providing free tier, is this a new paradigm shift? Have we entered a revolutionary Utopian age where industry hosting giants are paying us to use their service? Now that I have gotten your attention with a complete idiot statement, I shall move on to the real topic here. Recently, I’ve been getting more and more annoyed by affiliate/referral urls.

Just in case you don’t know what they are, I’ll give a brief explanation. They are systems that allow users to be earn revenue through referring friends or other people to a particular hosting company. So John Doe can earn money through a successful referral by getting his friend to click on his affiliate url and sign up with the hosting company.

Before we move on, here’s a random banter image that I found. And sorry but I don’t know who to credit.

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With affiliate/referral systems becoming more popular, have we entered into an age where we will see people filling up their forum signatures with affiliate urls and contributing meaningless and useless posts in popular hosting forums just to get people to click their affiliate urls? Is this the age where we focus on how to get more people to click on our affiliate urls than to contributing meaningful posts?

2015-09-25_18-54-45 A dedicated, loyal forum member who is upset over the flood of affiliate urls in signatures

It is true indeed that now people of our current age are thinking of many ways to get people to click on ads than to doing great and innovative things that benefit society. Well, Internet advertising and affiliate systems are double-edged swords. They do provide a source of revenue for people who spend their time contributing useful content. However, the evil side of it is becoming stronger and stronger. People and companies don’t care about the users, they just want to make money. People are recommending hosting providers just for the sake of putting affiliate urls in their posts. It’s not a genuine recommendation at all. Old birds of a particular forum may be able to spot insincerity without any efforts but the new birds might just be tricked into clicking the affiliate url. One day, it might be just be viewed as a tool of unethical publicity.

2015-09-25_19-08-41 An argument between 2 forum members over affiliate urls.

It’s just sad how these things that were used to transform lives are now used as tools of pure greed. I’m genuinely concerned over how the web will one day become… Will it become a place full of stolen content and websites targeted at getting people to click affiliate urls? Will humans evolve into a generation of degenerative, full blown stupid hairless chimpanzees? What do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.


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Author: Woo Huiren

Currently a student at National University of Singapore. I contribute to opensource projects - primarily PHP and Angular related. I write about PCF and PWS related stuff too.

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