Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things like a little tile with the coca cola writing). (EDIT: Okay, news.ycombinator.com also does it well with its inline job ads. See, I didn't even think of it as an ad, that's how nicely it's embedded.) The problem is that people used to use the internet to exchange files and information that was then locally stored on each PC. Now, you go to youtube, listen to a song, and 20 minutes later you download the entire video again if you listen to it (if you closed the tab inbetween). That stuff adds up and of course everyone is reluctant to pay that bill. The solution is going back to a decentralized download-culture like it was in the 90's. Storage space is incredibly cheap. Nobody has to pay that bill of transferring the same things over and over and over again.

"For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears."

My company makes most of its money off of advertising, I am broadly a fan of advertising (done well) myself, and yet.. I agree with your feeling at a core, technical level. I currently don't see how it's defensible to argue that a piece of software MUST render a certain stream of data in a certain way.

This is not about copyright, redistribution (we're not transforming then rebroadcasting), or ethics (to me). This is simply about having code on a machine transform an incoming stream to a visual representation, and while common standards and protocols (e.g. JPEG, HTML, CSS, HTTP) determine how to do that to get towards a desired result, I think any individual's code or computer should be free to render data as it sees fit even if that rendering is not what the creator intended.

Dictating how people or machines must intrepret things is a bad idea, IMHO. Provide the source data in whatever way you want, by all means, but the end user/device must interpret them as they will.

I like choice too, but a good design can go a long way: the frontpage of a newspaper for example. It dictates that the really big headlines were the most important, the medium headlines were somewhat important and the stuff on the side was interesting but didn't warrant a full article... and people liked this.

Im not sure why people defend ads. They fear the free web would be in danger? It already isn't free if it has ads.

In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it.

Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.

> Im not sure why people defend ads.

Nearly all the current voices in media rely on advertising for their existence. Nearly all of the most influential organizations are extremely biased.

im not sure if they rely on it i think its just part of the money that comes in. Totally weird but sometimes I wonder if enforcing by law that you can't get more than x% profit margins else you redistribute to the govt would actually fix the whole capitalism/corporate issue.

Of course this means the govt has to be controlled better - but thats an easier target than "all corporations"

You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomorrow, how much have we really lost?

I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abstract of a scientific study.

Most interesting content is created for personal blogs and Wordpress and even Tumblr, by amateurs and people that are writing because they like doing it. Or it's on the pay-walled dead-tree publisher websites, like NY Times, the Atlantic, MIT Review, WSJ, etc.

You would also lose Google, GMail, and YouTube.

You say it like it’s a bad thing.

Youtube alone hosts a vast amount of content - everything from archival footage to MIT lectures to people's cat videos, and all of it more or less free. Just because you personally dislike Google doesn't mean the world is better off without the services it provides.

I’d prefer the Internet Archive and the many non-profit and/or academic sites which still exist to host that content. People’s own cat videos they should host themselves.

That's fine, but it's reasonable that not everyone who wants to put videos online necessarily also wants to pay for the space, bandwidth and maintenance of their own server. And I don't know whether or not the Internet Archive has the budget or infrastructure to really replace Youtube at scale without resorting to monetizing the videos themselves.

I agree with you in principle, because if people hosted their own content they would have more direct control over it, and decentralizing the web is usually a good thing. But in practical terms the result of that would probably be the removal of a great deal of video content from the web, or moving most of it to whatever next best option is after Youtube (probably Vimeo.)

I've never been unduly bothered by ads directly on Google's properties. Text search ads are almost quaint today.

GMail is already a product people can and do pay for. That would surely be fine.

Google is in a different category for me as far as ads go. When people are actively searching for something, offering them things they are searching for is working with their interests. Most advertising, though, is distraction from whatever the user is up to, so it's working against their interests.

YouTube might have a problem. People might, god forbid, actually have to pay to host stuff. I suspect we'd survive.

So … in your idealized 90s web, how does a reporter pay their mortgage? Storage space was never the expensive part even back then – it's always been the skilled humans who create things.

Back then there weren't so many worthless garbage news sites. So the reporter most likely worked for a real newspaper that printed and sold the thing.

Those "real" newspapers only existed due to the "creepy" ads that you hate. IIRC we're talking like a third of the revenue coming from ads a decade ago. There are few newspapers in the world that would be economically viable with just subscription revenue, now or then.

If advertising dies as business model, it won't be just the Buzzfeeds of the world that go with it. Of course nobody can force you to watch ads. But the people you're hurting by doing that are in fact the same people making the content you're actually viewing. Your glee about killing just the low quality content providers by blocking ads isn't justified.

As jsnell pointed out, newspapers sold tons of ads – and the reason we had so much more resource-intensive journalism back then was because you bought the entire newspaper and so the classified ads, car dealers, etc. were subsidizing the Podunk Herald-Clarion's international reporters.

Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.

That's not our problem. It's the reporter's.

We are not responsible for helping businesses prop up their failing revenue streams.

Arguably, you are somewhat responsible if the revenue stream is failing because you want to consume content without caring whether anyone gets compensated for it.

That's approaching from the wrong angle. I am not responsible for publishers adopting a distribution format that allows me to render their content without ads (HTML). If they can't survive in an environment where people can freely (ethically, morally, and legally) block ads [1] then that really is their problem and not mine. The web has changed the face of publishing, but the world has no obligation to keep someones revenue stream going.

[1] It really shouldn't be called "blocking" ads. It's really just choosing not to render them. When I control the rendering device (my browser), I can make it do whatever I want. Good luck showing me your video ad when I'm browsing with "links".

Your point #1 is sophistry. They're making things available with the clear expectation of getting ad revenue. If you don't like ads, either don't visit the site or complain when it all goes behind a paywall.

Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.

It's hardly sophistry. My point is the web as it stands has certain features. One of those features is that servers can't control how clients render content. I think it's pure hubris for content providers to move onto the web and then suddenly demand that things work the way they want ("you must render our ads or you're stealing") ignoring the way things actually work.

> Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.

That sort of is my point, but not quite. Because once DRM is in the picture then I (and everyone else) won't partake of the content, which is what they want of me anyway. Until that time, I feel morally, ethically, and legally free to render their content as I see fit.

If your business model is publishing content on the Internet for free, it is not the responsibility of the readers to consume the content in a specific way to get you paid, or to come up with a way for you to get paid. You chose to publish on the Internet, without paywall. If you don’t like it, go back to not publishing.

Arguably? I don't think so. If the producer wants to protect their content, put it behind a paywall or similar. If you're sending out content to anyone for free, you can have no expectations of making money. Either guard it or don't, but don't try to put blame on others for your stupid decision to not guard it.

> how does a reporter pay their mortgage

Some combination of charging up front for access (with only a few samples shown to people who don't subscribe), charging for timely access (see LWN, which provides articles 1-2 weeks earlier for subscribers), and patronage (if you want to see more investigative reports like this, pay me via Patreon).

I agree, but this implies that these reporters would need to write articles that are useful or interesting enough for someone to want to pay money for. And writing like that takes real work and talent to produce, very different from churning out 50 click-bait articles per day. Lots of writers and sites that survive on the ad-based model would probably die off if they had to switch to a pay-for-service model.

Everything you just said sounds like a great reason for the ad-based model to go away.

That's certainly what I'm hoping happens – I think the ads / pay not to see ads model has a lot of potential since it's a short step from the current model.

That's also a much better answer than the person I replied to, who seemed to think that the problem was that we aren't using peer-to-peer file change.

>For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears

What a silly statement. Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio? You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads. If you don't like that contract then don't visit the site and limit your browsing to sites that adhere to your personal contract.

"Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio?"

Yes? Or are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to change the station during a commercial?

Viewership in tv and radio isn't measured directly, but indirectly through polls and surveys. You're counted as part of the set of potential viewers based on your age, location and whether or not you have a Nielsen box (or whatever they use nowadays.) TV stations don't actually know that you decided to turn the channel, and they don't really care, since that time has already been paid for.

When you can very accurately determine how many people have seen a web ad and you know how many people haven't, that more directly affects how much value can be extracted from that advertising. In terms of the actual effect on revenue, blocking a web ad would seem to have more impact than ignoring a tv or radio ad.

I would argue that it has exactly the same impact. Your argument is a bit of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" nature.

Unless the advertisers want to publicly (!) admit that they wish they could block TV content from people muting/changing the channel/walking out to make tea during commercials.

In addition, you can also mute the volume and/or walk out of the room during a TV commercial, and it's perfectly legal to record a TV show and fast-forward over the commercials.

No, but you do allow the presence of advertising on your TV or radio so why should web pages be different? That's the contract you agree to.

Allow how? I haven't watched an ad on TV since I bought my first DVR over 10 years ago.

Ad-blocking is exactly the same thing as turning the volume off during commercial breaks. Or perhaps turning the TV/radio off, and then back on again afterwards might be the better analogy, since then you are not consuming the "bandwidth".

If I wanted to hurt advertising, I'd create an extension that would fire a thousand click-throughs on their stupid ad, and vacuum up all their AdSense budget. Get a few million people world-wide doing that, and companies would quickly realize that they are spending an even more ridiculous amount of money on advertisements, and they would stop spending.

Not really as you're constantly having to turn the volume off and on when the show resumes. So you're interacting with the actual ad and subconsciously you've acknowledged what they're advertising.

As for hurting advertising by your click though scheme - do you really think you're the first one to have thought of this? They have measures in place to identify and disregard this.

The free content for ad views model is only tantalizing for web publishers because the internet, which they did not develop using their marketing budget, provides access to billions of eyeballs for very little cost. That fantastic bargain comes at the cost of playing by the internet's rules. The internet is not a broadcast medium, but a request-response medium.

Does tracking and maldvertising apply to TV and radio too?

> You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads.

No. They are giving me back some form of data than I can render however I see fit. If I want to render their HTML but skip the rendering of the ads, that's my business and not theirs.

There is no implied contract, only assumed/hoped for behaviour. The TV/radio/website operator emits freely accessible information to the world in the hope he will make money of it. There is no obligation on the receiver's part to behave as the operator wants.

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