We're all complaining and blaming the big corporations for the pitiful state the internet got to be now but seems we are all contributing our little to bring it even lower. Because corporations pay, I know, but we are the ones pulling the trigger.
Yep, when I created my first website in the mid 90s, ads were definitely already a thing. It was pretty bad even, worse than nowadays because there weren't any adblockers and ads would abuse the living hell out of frames and popup windows.
If you want the analogy to make sense, you have to specify a particular method of paying. At which point it becomes obvious that most places selling food let you use multiple alternatives. Websites usually don't give you a choice.
On the other hand, surprisingly few "ad-free" service tiers turn out to actually be ad-free, which tends to undermine the whole concept. It's extremely common to get various kinds of "special" promotions that don't go through the standard ad platform. Sites have been known to forget the premium option when A/B testing changes to ad placements. Multiple streaming services have ads on some shows even on their top "ad-free" tier (I think because the ad buy was with the original studio/network and is written into the show's distribution contract). Several marketing gurus have figured out ways to game social media networks to make "non-advertising" posts featuring their brands go viral (see e.g. the fad of "weird brand Twitter").
Yep, thanks Paramount Plus aka CBS All Access. I paid for ad-free, yet for some reason still see ads (previews/promotions for Paramount content). Fortunately I cancelled because their app would let me watch Star Trek Picard and Discovery, but it kept fluctuating colors from heavy green to purple. It only happened on the newer shows, not on the older Star Treks. My best guess is that the DRM thinks something weird might be going on, but it's just a plain Chromecast with Google TV. Making the user experience for paying customers suck is what leads to people going elsewhere...
Price thing: no one can afford to pay "a latte per month" for every site they visit.
Trust thing: the site is likely to still spy on you even if you're a paid subscriber. Even if they drop ads they'll send your data to google or some other analytics provider, at the least. They'll "accidentaly reset" your email preferences. Plus other shenanigans *.
Infrequency thing: I won't subscribe to $SOME_SITE just because it's linked on HN a couple times per year.
* friend of mine said he's tempted to subscribe to the economist online. I pointed out that they need to call or talk to a rep over live chat to cancel. Friend stopped mentioning subscribing to the economist.
I managed to subscribe at a really good annual rate vs. list through some online aggregator, where they pre-warn me of renewal and rate changes to let me cancel if I want. I don’t remember what it was without searching my email, so not shilling for them in any way, but there are methods.
That said, yeah-no one can reasonably afford the constant “I just want to read this one linked article twice a year on your local community news” turning into “subscribe for $120 a year after $1 for your first month”, and we really need some middle ground.
Unfortunately, people have an aversion-a hard aversion-to anything that’s not “zero” or “fixed”. I discovered it with Kagi, for example-despite whatever number of searches you find yourself actually running, having only “x per month” means you have to think about it, until you’re just like “pay the unlimited price and put the cost of thinking about it on them”.
Maybe with news the best way would be some kind of micro transaction, but all attempts so far have failed…
> Maybe with news the best way would be some kind of micro transaction, but all attempts so far have failed…
It's hard. I wouldn't pay a subscription to a micro transaction middle man, for example. Unless it would work like a music service, i.e. have everything available for one price, and not like a video service with their islands and attempts to differentiate.
But if they had everything, you'd end up with a gatekeeper that decides who can make money and who can't, and that ends up as censorship. If such a service ever comes up, i want to be able to pay for any site with it, including porn, right wing propaganda and left wing propaganda if i so choose. And that ain't going to happen.
Now suppose there would be competing services where you could pay 5 cents for an article read, and they'd bill you when you reach $10 or something for the transaction fees to make sense. That's okay, you pay per read, you can have accounts with several middle men because you pay per use.
But what do you pay for? One read? What if something comes up and you can't finish? Will you be able to save it for later reading or will that cost extra?
Perpetual access? With per-article access control that's going to be a major database after a while. Hard problem technically.
There is this thing called Zette: https://www.zette.ai/ - 30 cents per article on about hundred (so far) big newspapers. However it's not working for EU/Switzerland because data protection rules (what are they doing with your personal data???) and their FAQ site is broken, so I wouldn't even bother.
Fixed is great, it just needs to apply to a lot of sites.
Google was playing around with ad-replacement purchases, but they never made a version that does the same thing as youtube: pay X and all the google ads go away.
Frustratingly, even when you pay handsomely for subscriptions to major news providers, they still show ads (and quite a lot of them). A few are willing to sell you an ad-free subscription if you can establish a connection to the EU, but those seem to be thin on the ground.
I really and truly do wish this wasn't true, but it is. Part of this is because we've built an expectation that the only thing one needs to pay for to use services connected on the Internet is access, and once access is paid for, the problem is solved.
But that's not the case. Products cost money, and we've established a pattern of free to play to freemium for much of the most popular services. This could change, but it would take the major players to flip the script, and they've invested so much into ad systems that they'd be hard pressed to abandon it.
> The internet was just fine before it was turned into an ad delivery platform.
this is the comment I replied to. Apparently the old internet was fine, so what kind of "competition" are you looking for? Youtube gives you easy access to content you would have to spend hours trying to locate on "old" internet.
If you do not like their content, simply stop using their site. But it is immoral to pretend like it is OK to abuse their site, and deliberately hide their adviertisments that keep their site alive
Are you also okay with sites running crypto miners while they're open without having received your prior consent as a way to monetize? How about if they install a service worker in case you close the tab before doing sufficient mining to pay what they think is fair?
Personally, I run malware blockers by default, so I don't know which sites are trying to send it to me to avoid visiting them. I couldn't tell you whether e.g. the github link in OP has ads. I see some stuff gets blocked, so I guess maybe? I figured they monetize through upselling their enterprise offerings, but I guess it is Microsoft and their OS has ads built in these days, so wouldn't surprise me.
Because they both involve non-consensually using your computer for something you didn't want it to do as a form of "payment" you didn't agree to? In fact my point is I didn't see why you would ever consider crypto mining to be murder in this analogy. Crypto mining only uses your computer to do some pure computations and send the other party the result. It does not exfiltrate your private information or stalk you. It does not facilitate scams. It is obviously vastly more ethical than drive-by adware, which uses your computing resources and does those other bad things, but for some reason you don't find people defending crypto miners very often, while you do find them defending ads (I suppose because they participate in adware/spyware delivery somehow, so they're not interested in examining their own actions).
How can you justify it being okay to send drive-by adware and spyware with a requested web page, but you believe it's not okay to use computation as a form of payment without consent?
Personally, I've only ever worked for companies that make money by having our customers pay us for the product or service that I work on, so I've never had to worry about that conflict of interest.
If the ads would be self-hosted and properly curated by the hosting site I wouldn't have a problem with them (just as I don't have much of a problem with print or tv ads). The specific problem with web ads is that most of the web made a deal with the devil: 3rd-party ad-networks which are directly injecting who-knows-what into webpages. Those ads are not just cheap click-bait-trash, but also potential malware vectors. At that point, ad-blocking essentially becomes a civil duty ;)
...and FWIW the use of ad-blockers is indeed recommended by the German "Federal Office for Security in Information Technology":
The US federal government also officially recommends using an ad blocker to protect oneself from e.g. ransomware and fraud, and has issued a warning that online ads are being used for those things:
It's not really practical to know in advance whether any random site will invite me to view an ad; it's easier to just decline such invitations when they come.
But it's not just ads: that's disingenuous by understating the impact. It's the entire tracking, data broker, ad marketplace, surveillance capitalism ecosystem. This ecosystem causes immense harm in global climate, ruins lives, delivers malware, violates privacy, and supports authoritarian overreach.
This is why EU legislators have made the "cookie law". The site will tell you that they are using ads, and you are free to just leave. the. site. Stop mooching off people's hard work by killing their only source of revenue, ad blockers are immoral
> Stop mooching off people's hard work by killing their only source of revenue, ad blockers are immoral
What hard work? Most of the time it's "content" written by minimum (African) wage "copywriters"*. We are drowned into a deluge of shit, so excuse us when we don't trust anyone.
Also, I believe you have no idea what the "cookie law" is about.
* soon to be replaced with "content" that is LLM generated.
Yes, of course. Someone already payed [1] for the ads that they are trying to show to you and me and with that for the content funded with those ads. If we block them, nobody loses any money, at worst some future sales will not happen. And if you decide to get a subscription in order to get rid of ads, then you are paying twice - once with the subscription and your are also still paying a fraction of the ad budget with everything you buy.
[1] Unless companies are taking out loans for their ad budget hoping to get that money and then some back through additional sales.
But also because we refuse to pay. Any attempt at monetization is widely demonized, yet people still feel entitled to free content, and refuse to put their money where their mouth is and at least abstain from consuming the content if they really don't think it's worth the price
It's funny how scarce the "I'd be willing to pay for good content, but alas, there is no option" claim has become since websites have started widely implemented paid ad-free accounts or outright paywalls
I've never seen someone angry that a supermarket won't give them a newspaper for free, but when it's online this is apparently a valid complaint
I am willing to pay for good content, and do, but still often have little choice. E.g. I can't pay for google maps without ads. And no, it's not a reasonable take to suggest I not use any map app.
I also pay for online news, AND STILL GET ADS, so fuck that I block them. It's still the case today that most of the time you do not have an option to pay to get rid of ads, and often when you do it's some ludicrous amount like $10 a month for some blog you might read three times a year.
Part of being able to pay for content is to come up with a fair price for it.
I pay for and use Kagi. Apple Maps uses yelp which makes it useless for actually checking reviews of places. Kagi reviews link to other sources with ads.
edit: and I hope you're not implying that all people who don't want ads should buy an iphone just to use an app tied to it? Again, there needs to be fair alternatives to ads.
I'd say at least 80% of my maps usage is looking for restaurants or coffee shops and checking their reviews. Directions are maybe 20% or less. Apple has come a long way and their maps are good for directions, but not a good fit for the argument that the general public has little access to good alternatives to ad-based maps.
I assume kagi is based on open-street maps, I use kagi but not their maps as I have better alternatives. I really hope Kagi continues to succeed because its a model I believe in, but outside of basic search I suspect they have a ways to go.
Paying will at best temporarily stop ads, until the company wants more money and brings them back. Which we've already seen. And it will not stop aggressive user tracking at all. In fact, it will make the later worse for you on the individual level as it requires doxing yourself to pay and sorts you into the "has money" bucket which makes you a juicier target.
Yeah, it's a mistake to think of this a simple "just buy an apple a different stall in the marketplace" situation, we're way past that.
To bring it towards alignment with the status-quo, every fruit-vendor would be a facet of a few massive guildhalls, with spyglasses trained down from the parapets, informants circulating in the crowd, a parchment file on everyone, etc.
On the inverse, just because a business relies on ads doesn't mean it won't start charging money for certain things.
Businesses are always changing and there are no guarantees. Some money hungry bozo might become CEO of your favorite product and enshittify it. That's just reality, and it doesn't mean that paying for things is futile. Best to avoid having too many eggs in one basket and paying for things that you can't actually own.
Maybe we will see a fractionation between businesses that use the free but ad-supported model and the pay-based model.
Recently, the investment platform M1 Finance decided to begin charging users with less than $10,000 in holdings $3 per month to use their service while giving everyone access to features that used to be only available in the premium plan. This has all been announced in advance, so it's not as if anyone should have been surprised about this.
Many users, virtually all of whom have a total of holdings below the $10k threshold, flipped their shit and have claimed they are leaving the platform. Ironically, many of them are suggesting alternatives that cost more than $3 a month, and I'd wager a guess that a lot of these people are spending way more than that buying coffees every day. No one has to like having to pay for something that used to be free to them, but one really has to question their life if paying $3 for something that used to cost more than that per trade and require a lump sum up front is something to throw a fit over. If you have just shy of $10k in investments, you're not gonna retire, and $3 a month is the least of your worries.
In my opinion, M1 is doing the right thing by saying goodbye to these users. They are the types who won't value your product, maintain chronically low balances, and will tie up your customer support with spurious complaints and misunderstandings. I predict they will be rewarded for keeping around customers whom are willing to pay.
Hopefully, more online platforms figure this out and decide to do the same thing. I call BS on those claiming "no one will pay for that." If your business is only viable on attention, which is what the ad economy is based on, then its existence is in a precarious position, and perhaps your product isn't worth much to anyone except the ad networks. On the other hand, there are things that people are willing to pay for, or would pay for if given a premium experience. I've gone from watching stuff for free on YouTube to buying books and audiobooks because they provide far more value to me these days than the chum that is social media "content." I pay individual creators I appreciate on Patreon, etc. I have a Kagi subscription because I find it to be more aligned with my wants and needs than free search engines. I've gone back to buying individual songs and even buying CDs since they not only disappear from platforms but now there are artists that change their own songs retroactively. I pay my investment platform because it has better automation than competing free (or so-called free) competitors.
Everything being free online is a meme, and hopefully it starts to die the more that the spehre of free things eats itself with spam and user-hostile behavior. They will always exist for those who have barely any money or those who don't value the conveniences bestowed upon them, but they can't be the only viable options anymore. Paying for things is a good thing.
