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Comment by Stanleyc23 | Hacker News Reader

I think your missing the time scale to which this is happening. what I understand is that it's an article that tries to have a good UX when the article has minimal traction let's say 15 visits per hour, but high share-ability and once the network effects takes over and you have 1500 visits per hour, you pump in the ads.

this is fundamentally different from the usual ad-supported website because the quantity of ads is consistent across all users.

it's a clever dark pattern IMO.

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I understand the difference in timescales; I just don't see that much difference in the principle. Either it's reasonable to attract people based on free stuff and then monetize or it's not. I would agree that what is happening here is a dark pattern, but it's a dark pattern that has been the foundation for much of what people enjoy for "free" on the modern Web as well, so it doesn't seem particularly surprising to me that someone would try the same idea in a much accelerated process.

ok a more grounded expectation is that this basically is a bait and switch tactic, which I believe (not 100% sure) is illegal in the US.

(edit below)

it has to do with the amount of value inherent to the value proposition. you can try to exact more value from a product and potentially degrade the experience as a result. that's legal because it's a competitive business decision, but at some point you misrepresent the value of the product you are offering my changing the experience too much.

its a hazy line to draw because I think in the OP, the user may not have minded a couple ads, but rather they were annoyed by the inundation of too many ads to the point where you can't experience the actual value proposition of the article. then it becomes "spam".

it is not sufficient to deem this as just another business practice. there are obviously "working" business models such as Ponzi schemes that are highly illegal.

This seems like a stretch. The site doesn't, as far as I'm aware, have any control over who links to them in any form, including Facebook shares. I think it's unjustified, not to mention totally impractical, to say that a site can never change content it's offering (for free, no less) after it's first been published, just in case someone already linked to it and didn't like the change.

It's also not at all unreasonable, again IMHO, for a site that didn't start with ads but suddenly receives an abnormally high level of traffic to introduce ads at that time. Someone has to pay the hosting bills, after all.

A better bet if this mechanism is being abused might be to establish some sort of standard whereby a link could include a checksum that would then be invalidated if the linked content subsequently changed. This way, anyone following the link (including any hosting sites that share that link) could confirm whether or not what they were seeing was what was originally linked. You could take this further with some sort of standardised changelog and last updated indicator that sites could make available if they wanted to, and having browsers that detected a mismatch in a checksummed link warn a user before displaying the page and include recent update information if the site provided it. Lots of details would need working out, though, and I'm not sure I see enough upside to justify the complexity and inconvenience.

this is not bait and switch. 100% of the same content is there, even if the presentation is different. the site owner is able to change it at will, just like you can use an adblocker and change it yourself. cant say 1 method is acceptable while the other isnt.

also there's no explicit contract of delivery here, a headline alone doesn't confer that.

It's not bait-switch; it's not Ponzi; it's in no way illegal.

It's fucking douchebaggery though.

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