Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.
Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads.
The Internet has created a situation that did not previously exist. It is natural that we don't automatically know what the solution is.
It's the same reason that thousands of naive 20-somethings move to LA every year.
Are you kidding me? It's practically heresy around here to suggest that a startup should charge money and sell a product. Try it and see yourself derided as a "lifestyle business" instead of a real startup.
HN (and VC-funded startups generally) worship at the Church of Growth above all else, and the easiest way to get that coveted "hockey stick graph" is to give everything away for free. Grow now, and worry about revenue later, so the mantra goes.
I post about this in every ad-block article. The reality that nobody wants to admit is that most web content isn't worth paying for. Web publishers know it, and they're scared of a web that isn't funded by advertisements, because they'll have to find new jobs.
In my experience, the contents that really matter are written either by people who are NOT trying to make money from their writing because they wish to share experiences from their day jobs or free time, or by people who are payed for writing by someone but not by their readers.
The better option is to ask the user to turn off their adblocker and explain why (and say that the adverts are vetted for malware properly).
I don't see how I exploit them by reading their articles - more likely the opposite is true, and the authors actually hoped that many people would read their article and that their readers would get something out of it.
Maybe you are idealizing wage labour? The economy isn't fair, it's more like "winner takes all". There is a blurred line between work and joy. Some people just write for the recognition (which is not a synonym for pay), or because they really care about the topic. If only 0.01% of the internet population is motivated like that, then content will always be produced no matter what.
If they were full of existential fears, with no idea how to pay their bills, they wouldn't have the energy for writing at all. Or maybe they would be writing about their problems instead.
Imagine the following:
In a busy shopping mall, a busker starts to play music. A crowd starts to form enjoying the music.
Then, a strange thing happens - people with clipboards and cameras start to walk through the crowd taking photos of the shoppers and their children, making notes of their genders, heights and weights, clothing, and the shopping bags they are carrying, plus whether or not the women are pregnant.
A minute or two into the performance, more people walk through the crowd, holding placards with brand and product names on them. They walk up to each person, holding the placard in front of them and blocking their view, using a stopwatch to make sure they do so for at least 30 seconds.
One of the women says - 'hey, that's not cool - stop being so creepy'.
The clipboard and placard people remain silent, but the busker shouts - "hey - that's how I get paid! If you don't like it you are a criminal, stealing my performance".
No, I desire the business model to change.
> I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor.
My ancestors were literally kidnapped out of their homes and forced to do backbreaking work for little pay in intolerable conditions, often while being raped and beaten daily. You have a shitty business model and you want to compare your business failure due to incompetence to that? No, fuck that. Your comparison is outright offensive. Your failure to monetize your labor is not equivalent to slavery and it's disgusting for you to claim it is.
I am sorry you are offended. But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse. Not all slaves were also actively abused. But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.
I disagree, slavery is about force against consent. I agree that abuse isn't necessary for slavery to be bad, but force is. Nobody is forcing content creators to create content without their consent.
> But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.
I do plenty of labor for the benefit of others without recompense: I volunteer. Again, it's not about labor without recompense, it's about force. Slave labor and volunteerism are both labor without recompense: the difference is that slave labor is forced against the laborer's consent.
But let's go back to the ownership thing for a second: are you really claiming that people who use ad blockers are trying to take ownership of content creators and/or their content? Really? Even if I did agree with you that slavery is about ownership, your argument doesn't make sense.
EDIT: At a more fundamental level, it's completely arrogant and entitled to assume that just because you performed labor someone should pay for it. I've put a lot of labor into learning how to play guitar. I could probably post a bunch of recording of my guitar playing and get a bunch of people to listen to them and view ads. But I couldn't get anyone to pay for my recordings, because I still suck at guitar. Am I entitled to recompense for the many hours I've spent practicing?
As I said before: Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed. People doing things that are actually valued by others, where the site gets substantial traffic and ads previously paid for staff. This is not an argument that anyone who slaps something on the web deserves compensation. It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online. The expectation that all web content be provided for free is not a healthy or realistic expectation. And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that, or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.
> It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online.
"Worked" is not what I would say about the current state of ads on the internet. It certainly doesn't work for me.
> And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that,
Volunteering? Play? Definitely not slavery. If you don't want to labor for free, just don't do it. This isn't a complicated situation, you're smart enough to figure this out.
> or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
Well, I was on the internet in the 90s, and there was some great content back then. I'll actually posit that the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher then.
Also, funded content disappears all the time. If that's the effect you're concerned about, this isn't the cause you're looking for.
This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.
One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.
I'm not sure why anyone would care that these businesses don't work. Why are we expected to prop up businesses that don't work?