Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorhill | Hacker News Reader

> hardworking volunteers continually update and maintain the filter lists

This can't be said enough.

Large numbers of users still have no idea that their blocker works at all because of these lists.

The collective amount of work which goes into these free-to-use lists on a daily basis is impressive, especially considering it's done entirely on a voluntary basis.

To get an idea just glance at the commit rate:

EasyList/EasyPrivacy: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commits/master

uBlock Origin: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commits/master

Add to this all the regional lists, specific-purpose lists, the hosts files (Peter Lowe's, Dan Pollock, malware lists), etc.

View on HN

Thank you gorhill. Seriously, all the work you have done with uBlock Origin has made the world (wide web) a better place. And first recognizing the oft thankless blocklist maintainers here without a hint of name dropping yourself is truly honorable.

uBlock + uMatrix is such a powerful combo that I don't need any other ad- or script-related extensions on top of them. No Ghostery, no NoScript, none of that.

Big shout-out to all these volunteers indeed, I wouldn't use the web so much if it weren't for them making it half-decent.

The amount of effort being put into these lists as well as the success of your extension also speaks volume about how unbearable ads are nowadays. I hope we will never lose this battle, at least not on the Internet.

Would you be willing to turn adblocker into a time tracker and you pay for the time on site via a monthly payout via something like PayPal?

If not, would be interested on how you expect publishers to make money?

The problem is publishers assuming I care about this. That they're actually indispensable to the ecosystem, rather then what they are - a passing interest who's absence I wouldn't notice or care about.

Most of internet media just isn't good enough.

Thanks for getting to the point I wanted. Then I guess ads on these sites don’t matter, as they are so pointless, you’re not Visiting these sites.

However, you still do, so they have value. That value comes at a price, rather you think they are good or not good for the ego system. You’re actions speak in the camp of them being good.

I think we can all agree, some porn and content is not good. However, the value walks with out attention And not our moral desires.

Through out this thread I’ve seen people say they have no respect for Facebook or google and their ads, yet services they use daily. Unwilling to pay, the product is you.

Either pay with your money or lack of attention and this seems like it’s no longer a problem. M

The issue is, we want all this but want to provide them with little or not compensation for their value.

We use to speak with our attention, we didn’t like this store, so we never went there. Today, this extension is merely still going to the store, but ignoring what we dislike.

Thus is the debate.

There’s no debate. I use ad supported services (like Facebook) and I block ads. End of story. If these services go away because of some ad revenue problem (unlikely) I just don’t care. Right now there is no ad supported service that I believe I would pay anything for other than google search itself. I don’t have to right now so the issue is moot. I had a pretty rich life before Facebook and MySpace, somehow I’ll survive and I think I speak for a sizable chunk of people. Some people might value fb enough to pay for it like compuserve in the 80s. Good on them.

I can possibly see how these issues might matter to you if you make a living at google or a large content company, but I, like the vast majority of people do not. It is not my concern. I don’t get why this is so hard to understand.

Especially not newspapers. Not only their information often isn’t balanced, it is sometimes so much propaganda filled with verifiable false facts (e.g. on the wage gap) that I wish they would disappear. I mostly use them only to take snapshots and build videos about how the press publishes false information or correct information worded in such a way that the reader gets the wrong idea.

I would pay for Youtube. Or rather, for good youtubers. In fact, I donate using Patreon on a monthly basis to a few youtubers who provide accurate news. QED...

No wonder they are dubbed as “Washington Compost” or “Confabulated News Network”. And same for any social network (Twitter, Facebook and Youtube) who censor right-wing informtion, not only I don’t care about their ad revenue, but if they disappeared because of this, it would be a net win for society. Neither newspapers nor social networks will disappear, unfortunately.

I currently host my own email, at, if I only used the servers for email, considerable cost both in rent and time.

I wouldn't use Gmail, but I'd probably consider Fastmail if/when I don't want to host my own email anymore.

I might use Dropbox over Google drive (rather than store stuff on my server), and I might use Neocities.org to host a static Web site.

So there are many ad supported services that live next to "for pay" equivalent services.

As for content, I used to subscribe to lwn.net - but stopped when I realised I wasn't reading it closely enough to warrant the subscription. I might come back at a later date.

I'd love to see a site like like lwn that syndicated news; a clean look, perhaps with ads/delayed publishing to non-subscribers, the "subscription link"-system (i could share what I read with non-subscribers). And with proper compensation for conrmtributers (individuals and institutions).

We've had adblockers for fifteen years. It was reasonable to speculate that they might kill online publishing in the early 2010s maybe. But now?

Print doesn't have easy adblocking, it's just you and a pair of scissors. Which is stronger, print or web publishing?

How many years of adblockers not destroying the internet should we see before it's reasonable to reevaluate our initial assumptions about their impact?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...

There are hundreds of articles for any topic on the internet. Even if 10% of them could survive without ads it would more than enough. The problem is right now there is no way to distinguish between them without visiting them all. And I am not going to open and close 5 websites before I could finally find the one without ads.

Website owners could easily fix that problem by declaring some standard mandatory component of URL for every ad-supported page. I would happily write and use an extension that would erase all links that have e.g. string "/ads/" in them. That way I would never visit there part of the internet and wouldn't harm them in any way. However since they don't want to make this small step towards my needs they are welcome to go to hell.

I still subscribe daily to print newspapers. Today they had a half page ad for an amazon sale. No clickbaity content, no jarring colors, looks good, is designed to integrate with the content, and contains useful information.

How does it work? You want to publish an ad, you go directly to the publisher. You design the ad for the paper or the magazine. It looks good and works for everyone involved.

Web ads, however, are a complete anti-pattern. I imagine that the advertisers and the publishers can save themselves a lot of money and goodwill if they directly work together like they do in print.

The problem is how to finance the hundred thousand micropublishers. To avoid the adnetwork trash effect you’d need someone big, like medium, to implement some well integrated advertisement with revenue sharing, like youtube.

Failing that affiliate and ad networks and maybe microfinancing like patreon are the only things to get something out of micropublishing.

Doesn’t seem fair.

Bitcoin / Lightning / browser integration / one click article buy may solve the problem in the future.

HOW?

How would it actually solve it in a way that previous attempts at pay-per-read microtransactions haven’t?

What the fuck does Bitcoin have to do with it?

Keep in mind that the majority of browsers (Safari and Chrome) have built in payment mechanisms already.

> What does Bitcoin have to do with it?

Previous poster was using it as an example of a medium for exchange used with micropayments.

Bitcoin is probably the worst example of micropayments, though.

Also, bitcoin has been completely incapable of doing micropayments for a long time.

That's why I have mentioned the combination of Bitcoin / Lightning, not only Bitcoin. Lightning seems very suited for micropayments.

I've come to realize that there are two things called "Bitcoin". One is the actual technical system that exists. That's the thing that (slowly) does 2-4 transactions per second, and is mostly driven by speculation and some light crime. Approximately nobody uses it for actual commerce.

Then there is "Bitcoin" the idea. You can see the start of it in the initial paper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] This is the techno-libertarian ideal of a perfect, stateless financial system that magically solves all financial problems

So Bitcoin-the-idea has everything to do with any money-related problem. Even though Bitcoin-the-reality is in fact not helpful for this. As the idea and the real thing diverge, it becomes more obvious that a large number of Bitcoin-the-idea adherents are essentially religious in their behaviors. (There's another, much smaller segment for whom the idea is something they are working toward. You can tell them because they will distinguish between present and (imagined) future.)

Unfortunately, the Church of Bitcoin attendees welcome questions like your about as much as parents welcome people saying that Santa doesn't exist. So thanks for speaking up and asking blunt questions like this despite the flack I'm sure you get.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Reminds me of old computer magazines like BYTE and Macworld. Context is something completely ignored these days.

I specifically whitelisted the ads on Daring Fireball (and a few other sites) because they're 1) relevant and 2) unobtrusive. I would whitelist any site with the same policies.

Back when I bought magazines at news stands, the ads were a big part of the reason as they were targeted to my interests (without spying on me). I want to connect with relevant advertising. I just want to do it on my terms, with out spyware, malware, slow load times, autoplaying video and sound, distracting animation, etc.

I am happy to pay directly for content that is interesting and useful to me. For a long time, I subscribed to computer magazines like Byte, even when I had Internet access and supposedly had all the information at my fingertips.

These days, I can't remember the last time I've read a good article on technology someplace other than on a blog, a website of a group of enthusiasts. If I ever ended up on websites like Wired or The Verge in the last five years or so, it was definitely by mistake.

Many publishers make money through ads because most people wouldn't pay a dime for that stuff. Catchy is good enough to make people waste time, but not money.

Edit: oh -- it's not all black and white, either. I use an ad blocker, but I whitelist the pages where I think it's worthwile. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. Publishers who put out quality content and whose ads don't try to serve me malware (eh, Forbes?) get whitelisted. Everyone else, to quote the famous nihilistic philosopher B. B. Rodriguez, can bite my shiny metal ass.

Consider, you are posting on HN that does not have 3rd party advertisements the website is simply cheap enough to keep running that it does not matter. Personally, I would not mind if all the advertising supported publishers went away. There are enough people willing to make absolutely free content that as a consumer I really don't need more than that to be entertained.

Still, there are a range of funding available that doesn't depend on advertising such as donations, subscribers, and or merchandising. What's at risk is really the lowest form of content that can't be supported with it's own merits and I really see the problem if it simply goes away.

> Personally, I would not mind if all the advertising supported publishers went away.

There are a large number of award winning hyperlocal news websites run by hardworking and talented local news journalists who rely on advertising to survive. With out them though, there's be no one to report or investigate the shady things going on in local government.

This advertising is directly sold by them (which isn't easy to do in an Era of Google and FB), without networks.

For 99% of them, it's the most practical way to pay the bills. Subscribers are possible, but only if you're established and you have a wide enough audience. For a small town you'd need 1000 subscribers at 5k just to make a 60k pretax salary which support 1-2 staff members.

Advertising supports hard journalism, which supports a healthy democracy. Ask yourself if all publishers supported by advertising going away would truly be a good thing.

Such as http://www.onlondon.co.uk/ though they raised money through a fund raising platform https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/on-london-co-uk (Edit to add link to fundraising, disclaimer: also I personally know the main jornalist, but not finally connected)

>Advertising supports hard journalism, which supports a healthy democracy.

Hard journalism is corrupted by advertising. It leads to corporatocracy and an unhealthy democracy.

Independent media with public funding and a charter to support the public good (e.g. like the BBC used to be run) works better.

The BBC was never better. It’s a media organisation. By virtue of the people in the industry it must have a left wing bias. More importantly, being a bureaucracy that still exists we know that it’s continued existence is its primary aim. The BBC and all the similar organisations in different countries helped define the bounds of polite opinion. Whether that was 30-70 or 40-60 on some hypothetical left-right scale the effect is the same. People outside the Overton window hated the established media, whether the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph or the ostensibly non-partisan BBC. The explosion in television channels and more importantly, the internet led to an information free for all. The Overton window for polite opinion hasn’t shifted much but people are a great deal more aware of the alternate viewpoints and possibilities. The number of people who find the BBC or any other establishment organ both ideologically congenial and politically relevant has undergone a decline that’s irreversible. The information ecology and economy have changed.

There are plenty of media organisations with a right or left wing bias. The Overton window is defined by the audience not the media. Media gets dumped on by both the right or left when they step outside of the safe zone.

Most telling foreign news may seem left leaning when that country views them as right leaning. In other cases the reverse happens because large organizations pander to their audience and/or the government not what foreigners may think.

The Overton window is not purely defined by what the audience thinks. Consider the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or the US during WW2 when freedom of speech was at best a farce. In quasi democratic societies you’re constrained to stay within some distance of the median voter or have any attempt to influence the discourse break down. That’s plenty to influence politics. There’s a lot of difference between +1 and -1 standard deviations from the mean in politics, plenty to sustain the tribalism that’s the driver of most politics. Maybe you need to go up to + or - 2 s.d. to dampen dissent but I doubt you need to go further.

Imagine if the internet didn’t exist. Do you think anyone would have payed attention to the German New Year’s Eve rapes? It’s not like anyone in the media class was going to do it before the cover up was a story in itself.

I mostly agree with your point.

I was defining say Chinsease sensors as part of the audience rather than the news organization as the orignization does not have contowl over them. Much like in the US Fox News/CBS etc gets a list of words it can't say, they can add to that list but not remove from it.

I'd say there are quite a few issues (foreign policy, for instance) where the cable news networks are more or less in lockstep with each other but not really representative of the general views of Americans.

Or, to give you another example, consider the tremendous amount of opinion column space given to people like David Brooks who represent a tiny proportion of voters -- and then compare it to the total absence of, say, anyone aligned with Sanders (who I think we can pretty safely say is more popular than any of the world's Never-Trump Republicans).

IMO, that's a function of a subset of Organizations. Al jazeera news exists as part of a different spectrum, but they still customize their message for different nations. Brazil's local news has again got it's own very different spin on things.

I mean, yes, media from different countries is different. That's one reason why I go read RT once in a while. But the US is dominated by its own homegrown media.

>The Overton window is defined by the audience not the media.

Corbyn's enduring popularity in spite of initial hostility from every single media establishment would appear to contradict this narrative.

The agenda of each media outlet is clearly set by the owners albeit with market forces sometimes pushing them one way or the other.

Almost, the Overton window is often much wider than individual media companies use. However, your point actually supported my argument as the audience was clearly willing to accept outside the range of existing content.

In the reverse case everyone would ignore Corbyn as people do flat earthers. It's only because he exits within the audiences realm of acceptance that anyone is willing to pay attention.

Hyperlocal media supports smaller coverage areas where it's not practical to have a publicly funded organization. Even then, you're going to have debates regarding the agenda of the organization.

At a local level advertising generally does not corrupt the journalism. At the local level, it's community oriented where the journalists are genuinely interested in giving a voice to advertisers as well as informing citizens. It's a more positive ecosystem than what you see on the national level.

I've never heard of hyperlocal investigative journalism. Local journalists simply won't have the resources to be able to do it.

At a local level advertising probably doesn't corrupt the journalism simply because there isn't very much of it.

Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I serve ads for these types for a living, so I do have a lot of expertise here.

https://inn.org/members/ http://www.lionpublishers.com/members/list/

There are thousands more that are not members - simply professional and entrepreneurial journalists trying to make a living doing what they care about.

My hyperlocal news outlet is “sponsored” by many local businesses. I have always felt there was a conflict of interest created by this sponsorship.

One of the businesses is an auto shop. If that auto shop is doing something like re-using old oil to save money on oil changes or some other shady tactic would the hyperlocal news go after them?

I’ve never seen investigative journalism out of my hyperlocal news, it is all just community news about upcoming events and the like.

I could be mistaken but your links don’t make it clear to me that any of these hyperlocal organizations are doing investigative journalism. My hyperlocal outlet certainly doesn’t.

An ethical journalist will absolutely go after that auto shop. But what you're describing is a political/ethical conflict which can arise any time an organization accepts support money, even from readers.

There are not a lot of hyperlocal investigative news outlets listed there although granted there are some.

The ones that do exist appear to be non-profits relying on donations (e.g. aspenjournalism.org / birminghamwatch.org) that don't run ads and give a strong impression of being run by one or two people.

I'm really unconvinced that this is a significant industry let alone one that is supported by ads.

There are quite a few, and as I mentioned, most of them are not affiliated with any organization. I wouldn't operate a business based on a market that didn't exist. I guess you can choose to believe otherwise though - although I'm not sure why.

If corporate advertising inevitably corrupts journalism to support corporations, then why doesn't Government support inevitably corrupt journalism to support bigger, more centralized, and more intrusive Government?

I've never heard of a corporation run by somebody who wants to make less money.

I've regularly heard elected government representatives argue that their government should be smaller, less centralised and less intrusive.

What exactly made you think these situations were in any way analogous?

Pre-2003 BBC regularly used to hold the government to account because it was explicitly independent and it had a charter that emphasized its responsibility to the public. That kind of set up simply isn't possible if you are advertising funded - the conflict of interest is too great.

    > What exactly made you think these situations 
    > were in any way analogous?

That's so condescending it made me cringe. As if you're scratching your head why someone would be skeptical of state-run media.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of state funded media but the Koch-linked corporate think tank narrative of "big bad bureaucracies" is a pretty facile one.

I'm not really sure what your curious apparent inability to find companies not cartoonishly intent on profits or your acknowledgement of the existence of elected advocates of smaller government has to do with the question.

I'm also not terribly convinced by "holding things to account". I'm sure many news organizations have, and many more have been accused of, criticizing large corporations for specific misdeeds without necessarily questioning the overall capitalist systems that allows them to exist. Likewise, news organizations also can and have criticized specific governmental misdeeds without necessarily advocating that the government should not be involved in specific things at all, or that some specific things should be handled by a more local government versus a national-level one.

> For a small town you'd need 1000 subscribers at 5k just to make a 60k pretax salary which support 1-2 staff members.

1000 subscribers @ 5k is 5 million dollars. You probably meant $5/month.

Correct, $5/month is the upper bound of what I've seen the more successful hyperlocals pull off (most recently bklynr in Brooklyn)

Honestly, it would be better for these hyperlocal sites to be supported by ads from the local community, both for lack of toxic ads and for the fact that most readers will be in the same community. Now there's a startup idea for you.

Yes, and that's pretty much what I do

> Ask yourself if all publishers supported by advertising going away would truly be a good thing.

Yes. Along with the model of paying people to access information. We should get used to the model of paying people to produce information that we support, even information that we don't consume ourselves. An overtly propagandistic model, rather than the covert propaganda by advertisers/political actors model that we use now.

Seriously: how much of a burden would it be for 500 people to cover a single journalist's salary, and the medium through which they publish? Patreon is a working example; there just need to be better tools, models, and expectations other than conning 2% of internet browsers with deceptive ads as the only thing holding our democracy together.

you are posting on HN that does not have 3rd party advertisements the website is simply cheap enough to keep running that it does not matter

This is misleading. HN does have ads, in the form of job posts for the YC companies. The site itself also serves as a business development tool for a (now) huge investment fund.

Additionally, this site isn't so cheap to run anyone could do it without caring about the cost. The hardware and bandwidth isn't free [1], but more importantly, I believe multiple people work on HN part-time, and dang works on it full-time [2]. That's not cheap, at all.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889575

2. https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...

Let's say it's ~2 million every 5 years. That might sound like a lot of money, but it's couch cushion level of expenditure for a large organization. YC easily extracts enough value to keep it running.

Like Wikipedia the vast majority of value is from free content. That trend continues across my browsing habits. I need to use an ad blocker because I frankly don't see a lot of them.

> HN does have ads, in the form of job posts for the YC companies.

I don't really agree with how you're defining portfolio company job links as ads.

AFAIK they do not charge portfolio companies for job links, so is it really an ad if they don't charge for it / it generates no revenue? The companies and tech mentioned in their descriptions are often just as interesting as other stories posted here. They are more in a gray area of content marketing or sponsored content than native advertising.

I suppose you could make an argument around it potentially increasing the value of their equity stake in a company by making that company more valuable. It seems a bit roundabout — I don't consider them ads any more so than a link to your blog post is an "ad" for your blog, or the comment posts in the monthly job threads are "ads".

Ryan didn’t make a leap; that’s the literal definition of the word. First definition I found: a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy.

Ryan’s link to his blog is 100% an ad, IMO. So are YC portfolio job postings.

Where do you drawn the line between when a link to a blog post is / isn't an ad? Is every submission that links to any site an ad? This seems like a gray area to me.

I don't think a job posting is ever not an ad. Whether pasting a link to one's blog is or isn't for me depends on the motivation.

If the motivation is "I might forget my blog address; better record it here", it's not an ad. If the motivation is, "I want people to be able to find out more about me/drive awareness of me or the blog," it's an ad.

HN does not produce content. The other methods also don't scale as well.

Advertising is the fastest, easiest, most scalable, and most egalitarian method there is.

The actual issue people seem to have with is the modern online implementation that is slow, invasive and frustrating. There are companies doing a better job and things will get cleaned up but there's nothing wrong with the concept itself.

IMO, HN comments generally exceed the value of the story linked. Wikipedia suggest you really can scale content without Advertising. For major news organizations you have things like NPR that again work fine. I also brows plenty of forms that may or may not have a banner ad at the top and both models work.

In the wider realm it's a mixed bag, but advertising really does not seem necessary.

HN comments wouldn't exist without the stories to talk about in the first place, otherwise it's just a message board, which have been basically free to host for a decade.

Wikipedia is an outlier that goes through intense fundraising to survive. It also does not produce content.

NPR has lots of advertising: https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/npr/platforms/npr-org/

Media publications are businesses and they need to make money to survive. Donations never work and if you tried to pitch that as the business model at even the hippiest startup convention, you'd be laughed off. Subscriptions do work but the public does not understand how to price the value and would rather go to starbucks instead, clearly seen in the endless comments and downvotes on HN when there is paywalled story or advertising talk. Subscription also bring up the issue of access for people without the means to buy.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

20% of NPR's funding comes from corporations. Useful yes, required no.

It feels like advertising, but in practice it's virtue signaling. Much like giving to Habitat for humanity corporations want recognition for their donations, but as pure advertising it's not worth it. So, if they where not mentioned on air corporations would likely cut back, but not to zero.

Cool, let's just take away 20% of the revenue then and see if it's required or not. As quoted on that page: "Sponsorship from local companies and organizations is the second largest source of support to stations."

Virtue signaling is still advertising, paying money for exposure. Otherwise it's a corporate donation and that does not scale at all. You can look at the continuous travails of open-source projects that deliver billions in value but get no funding as a perfect example.

The point is that NPR comes nowhere near the massive amount of content that people consume but don't pay for. Please don't just assume the entire industry is incompetent, there are millions of people working in these media companies and they are constantly trying new options. So far, outside of subscriptions for certain high-end brands like the Financial Times, advertising is the only sustainable model found.

I am not saying the industry is irrational, I am saying it's output is mostly irrelevant to me. Further, advertising supported media is consistently the least valuable segment (to me) because they don't need to be as good to continue. They maximize profits by minimum effort and maximum views which creates mountains of meaningless drivial targeting emotional resonance.

Click bait is an outgrowth of payment in eyeballs.

As to virtue signaling, I bring that up because it can occur even if they are never mentioned on air. A company can say they are a corporate sponsor of X even if X only ever mentioned them on an obscure part of their website. In the world of virtue signaling simply accepting money creates vale. NPR is behaving rationally to accept as much money as possible and even to put effort into getting more because at effectively 90% the funding they would create less value, but clearly they could still create significant value with 90% of their current funds.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make now. Your original comment was that you would be fine if ad-supported publishing went away because there are other models. I'm telling you that there are none that come close to the scale of advertising. The examples you cited either do not produce content or are a microscopic part of the media landscape. Tastes are also subjective and what you call low-quality might be exactly what someone else is looking for.

Anyways, if advertising went away, a massive amount of media you see today would also disappear. You would definitely notice that.

And that's before even getting to the even more massive impact it would make on the economy since every major company today relies on advertising for growth and sales. It's easy to look at few annoying banner ads and say that they suck, but this is a 12-figure global industry that plays a critical part in the economy. It's just not that simple.

The only TV I watch is the Olymics, would it go away without advertising well possibly. I bring that up because my habits are well outside the norm. Would I be aware of 95% of the news disappearing sure, would it directly impact me well probably not.

Advertising is largely zero sum, it increases the cost of products while increasing individual product sales. People would buy almost exactly the same amount of food for example without any advertising so that's pure dead weight to society. Despite all those car ads people would still buy a car without them further without that massive cost those cars would be either cheaper or better, etc across a huge range of industries. Without ads people would still buy soap and other home goods, at worst they would pay less when doing so.

The real issue is that ad-based companies seem to have a feeling of entitlement that makes no sense. It is perfectly normal and reasonable to choose for yourself what you like to watch or listen to on some media.

I personally have no interest in seeing any kind of ads and indiscriminately block all of them. I'm perfectly fine if that causes companies with ad-based revenue to go bankrupt, and there is not slightest legal or moral obligation for me to support these companies.

If you have a company and worry about ad-blockers, the first thing you need to do is to create a product that you can actually sell.

Of course, as long as they don't complain and stop whinning about ad-blockers, I have no problem with companies who base their revenue primarily on ads. I'm simply not one of their customers.

Nobody is saying you can't choose things for yourself. Where did you interpret that?

It's not about ad-based revenue. Every single company relies on marketing for success, and so the economy is tied to advertising. There's a reason that some of the largest companies in the world are advertising businesses. People are also bad at judging value and dont/wont pay for things like news. Like I said before, plenty of publications sell subscriptions but HN threads still whine incessantly about paywalls, while also ignoring how many people can't afford to pay but would still like access.

Also, adblockers are not really a big deal, there are plenty of ways around them, especially if you want the content, and you're at best blocking about 10% of the advertising that's reaching you anyway.

My web app was time consuming to design and create, and fully ad supported. There wasn’t anything like it and people loved it within the niche. It would have been difficult to get started with merchandise, subscribers or donations, but once we had traffic it was easy to sell advertising to fund further development.

You'll notice people here will say then you shouldn't exist if you depend on ads. They essentially prefer a centralized internet.

You’re vastly misunderstanding what exactly Hacker News is. It has multiple(?, two?) full time employees working on it, funded by Y Combinator, one of the most ‘important’ venture capital firms in Silicon Valley/US.

Hacker News is a marketing expense for this investment institution.

Most newspapers are also "marketing expenses" for their owners. Editorial independence has always been a challenge for the press, either from "philantropist" owners or from big advertisers.

If those employees went away and were replaced with a couple more volunteer mods and an hour-per-month server maintenance budget, what would change?

The site would collapse. That’s not an exaggeration. Those two aren’t merely employees; they run and direct HN.

I disagree with many of their decisions, but they’re largely irreplaceable.

There are also a lot of behind the scenes volunteers that do the work, too. But making the front page interesting on a daily basis is no small feat, and from an outside POV that seems almost entirely thanks to those two.

I thought votes did the front page?

The front page is highly curated. From time to time you will see stories that are many hours old with a handful of upvotes overtake newer and more popular stories.

Those stories are promoted by staff because they are interesting and didn't get the limelight they deserved.

The reverse also happens. For example, many cryptocurrency stories are suppressed because they are neither interesting nor novel.

So in short, yes, votes play a role, but without curation, HN would be a cesspit of self promoting cryptoscams and repetitive content. (After all, how hard could it be to fake HN votes?)

How much does HN actually take to run?

At least $400k, ballpark, factoring in the employee costs.

There is no way this is true. People were running BBS systems out of computers in their closet in 1997, with thousands of users.

As hilarious as this is as a statement, I'd really love to see some backup for this as I just cannot believe this is even close to true.

Three full time employees taking turns moderating comments and submissions 24x7, with silicon valley salaries?

I'm not sure I'd agree to a "time tracker," but I am generally way more willing to pay to get content easily and donate to sites I like than I was when I was younger.

By charging users. It's the only truly honest way.

>If not, would be interested on how you expect publishers to make money?

Why is it our responsibility to find a way for all publishers to make money?

I'll start with the premise that underlies my thoughts here: I like content that some publishers put out, and I accept that it costs money to produce.

I'm a fan of the book Extreme Ownership, and reading your question got me thinking (a bit laterally, admittedly) about the book. I'm in a situation right now where I read and enjoy content made by professional publishers, and I also generally hate the direction Internet Advertising has gone. This puts me in a bit of a pickle... I can use an ad blocker, fully accepting that I'm cutting off the revenue stream from people whose content I enjoy, or I can not use an ad blocker and waste my battery, get tracked, and be generally annoyed.

But what can I do about this? I can sit and bitch about it, I can wait until someone else comes up with some solution (which may just be ad-blocker-pay-walls, urgh), or I can spend some of my brain cycles thinking about and sharing my thoughts on solutions that result in publishers still having revenue without the parts that annoy me.

Maybe you don't enjoy content that publishers put out, and that's totally fine. In that case, it's probably not worth thinking about; the publishing industry having terrible flash ads and video popups and things doesn't affect you, and if they go broke from not coming up with an alternative revenue model, that won't affect you either.

This.

Would people be willing to shell say $5/mo towards their online news content consumption?

A browser plugin could then track time spend (keep all data local), at the end of the month, present a simple dialog that says, your top 5 destinations were these, uncheck any that you don't want to pay, and rest will get your $5 divided by time spent.

This way users would get to browse ad-free, thanks to the ad blocking solutions, while publishers would also get some revenue. Ideally the payment service could generate some revenue as well and pass some to further developement/maintenance of the ad blockers.

Cheers mate. You're the real star, though!

We're opening up our threat intelligence system on the blockchain and soon to reward people in a new token for submitting and validating links. Mostly geared towards anti-phishing, malware, child safety and news credibility. metacertprotocol.com

Time to pay the volunteers! :)

A whitelist sounds like it would be far easier to maintain, though each user would be on the hook for that.

No more cat-and-mouse that you'd have with the blacklisting approach, at least.

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