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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

There must be a point between "advertisement for useless junk" and "useful advice + an affiliate link" where the two cross over, and as far as I can tell the only differences are relevance and directness.

One example of advertising that I think is acceptable are the ads on the slatestarcodex.com sidebar, which are manually placed there by the author and targeted directly at the niche he writes in. If a computer could achieve the same precision when choosing what ads to run, and based its choices on the publication rather than the user, I think it would also be acceptable to me.

Would you find such ads equally unpalatable?

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Ads are bad. I'm not shopping not stop. I just want to read my article or whatever I am doing at that moment.

When I want to buy something I go to a shop and being there I still don't want ads. I want accurate specs, relevant statistics, maybe pictures and honest reviews. Sometimes I could use a guide, when it's not my domain.

I never stopped in the middle of something to say "I'd so watch an ad right now".

So perhaps you need to find paywalled news/review outlets without ads. Someone has to pay for the articles being written, servers, bandwidth etc

You're so on-point. All these rants about ads don't think about who'd pay for the content you're consuming if not for the ads.

You can't have high quality content and not pay for it - with ads or otherwise.

If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm not necessarily speaking in favor of ads. I'm just pointing out the shallow analysis which characterizes these companies as greedy or bereft of common decency who want to shove ads down your throat. It's a really unfortunate and ill-considered narrative

> If you want ad-free, keep your credit card ready every time you open your browser

I'm hopeful we can smooth this experience quite a bit. In the near future, we have (as the current best extant example) in-browser Apple Pay backed by an HSM (either the touch bar or an Apple Watch). Presumably other vendors could implement something similar since at least the payment part isn't proprietary.

In the slightly more distant future, we could improve efficiency/privacy/reliability by using Bitcoin micropayment channels instead of credit cards, but same idea.

He's not on-point at all. You can find amazing content not touched by ads all over the internet.

Making money is hard but his way of doing it is nothing to admire.

I don't know why you think I need to do something. Perhaps you need to realize that annoying your readers is not the best way to approach the issue.

Leaving aside the assumption that somebody has to pay just because you did something, selling my visual comfort for how much? a tenth of a cent? shows me how much you value your readers.

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