Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

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People are not prepared to pay for your content, so you bemoan that when you give it to them for free (but in so doing destroy their privacy), they attempt to block that revenue stream.

I'd like to suggest advertising has become a crutch, preventing you from innovating: why not try and find a way to produce product content that people wish to pay for?

If you can't do that, you have two choices: continue as you are, but see it as a voluntary hobbyist project in which the content is given to the public domain and you do not monetise it; or, give up and let others decide.

The best thing that could happen to the Internet today is the destruction of the advertising industry.

Yes, it will change how Google and Facebook will need to make money. Some of these unicorns might struggle to survive and will die. It will cause a revolution down through the millions of smaller publishers as they have to think about how to make money without advertising: many will not be able to survive and will become nothing but memories on archive.org.

So be it. This, in the opinion of many people including myself, will be for the betterment of us all as a society.

So, respectively, I'm going to have to decline your request.

I'm installing AdNauseum and I sincerely hope that advertising industry is destroyed to the point that you have to find a new - better - revenue model.

Good luck.

> This, in the opinion of many people including myself, will be for the betterment of us all as a society.

If you achieve this, the result will be that the only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests. They may be companies (who write content as marketing), plutocrats (who will publish pro-business propaganda) or the state.

This is where we are heading: where the average citizen learns about their country from a Facebook feed, written by the Koch brothers.

This is going to have incredibly harmful effects on our society, and - I will not mince words - it seems to me the blame will rest with _people like you_.

That means YOU will be responsible for fake news and newspapers competing with the worst of the internet. That YOU will be responsible for advertisement disguised as news. All because you were too outraged to accept ads and too apathetic to pay a few dollars for paper news.

>only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests

Here's a beautiful and informative website: https://bestmotherfucking.website/

According to Firefox's Network Monitor, that's 2.47kB of data transfer. It's static HTML, so server load is minimal. One small donation could cover the costs for years.

It is not the server costs that are expensive; it's producing the content.

This. I feel like a lot of the responses are along the lines of; "you can get a VPS for 2€ so your site will still be profitable if 99% of users adblock; stop whining".

I think what people are saying is nobody owes you a living (this isn't meant to sound rude, I mean you don't owe anyone else one either, do you).

If something isn't working the way you want, that's a sign to do something else.

So if my side project is not working out, I will work for google or facebook. I don't think that's better.

Your claim was about the cost to "publish on the net", not the cost of production.

>If you achieve this, the result will be that the only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests.

The web was specifically designed for that to not be the case. Despite all the garbage we've loaded on it since then, ultimately it's still an act of mere minutes for anyone with an internet connection to start a website and serve it to all comers.

Tools like IPFS and Bittorrent only enhance that ability. The future is rosy, and it does not need advertisers.

Oh, no-one needs ad revenue to serve content.

What they need is money to produce content worth reading.

Just like people need money to write songs or play sports. No money, no sports... oh, wait, that’s not how it works.

People with something to say will find a way to say it, money or no.

The way this works for sports and music is you produce for free because you love it and are good at it, until you are scouted or discovered or get an agent, and ‘go pro’.

Used to work the same for writing. Can’t see why it shouldn’t just because a few written word performers prefer busking.

And how are they to 'go pro' if there is no business model to be a professional journalist / researcher / reporter / documentarian?

I think you believe we can get all our content from local, interested bloggers. We can't. There is no filtering and no curation. There are no stakes in telling the truth because no one has a business to defend. Pulling information together and filtering out the rubbish is long and arduous and it's work. That's what journalism actually entails, not the writing part, which is fairly trivial.

But yours seems to be a typical HN response. "People feel this is important to do without being paid, therefore we should not support them as a society". It is an attitude I cannot comprehend. Something is important to our civil society - why not make doing it a viable living?

You're assuming the only way to make it a viable living is via advertising.

I pay for the Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic and others. I would pay more for them, sans adverts.

If you can't produce content that people want to pay for, what are you actually doing?

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