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Comment by nothrabannosir | Hacker News Reader

Paid subscription content is the eternal September of HN conversations, and I’m really sorry to even hint at it again, but on that page I essentially see two things:

- regular ad (ok, I see your point here)

- ads for their own subscription product

I don’t understand how advertising their own product, on their own site, using limited free samples, is… wrong? Or against the spirit of a decentralised internet? I wasn’t around during the BB era, maybe that’s my lack of experience speaking.

Is that not part of the internet we want? I wouldn’t mind people advertising a paid product on their own site with free samples to try it out. What else do we expect? Everything gratis always ? Honestly I’m pretty hard-core agpl freedom Stallman emacs noshower mode, but even I have to admit: this seems fair.

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The things you see as a problem are not the things that annoyed me:

A) The Economist says that article limit is 5 per month. But they waive that limit for Google Crawler. So they mislead search engine into thinking that article is accessible, when actually it is not. They intentionally misrepresent as a free service to attract free SEO traffic.

B) The person who shared link to that article was not aware people like me will not able to read it. They were also mislead into thinking is an accessible resource, to get free shares.

C) Even if you don't have a problem with A and B, their UX is ridiculous. One message to subscribe is covering another message to subscribe. As the same time there is a newsletter popup which promises you a PDF.

I hope that now you better understands what annoys people. It's is not that business are trying to make money; it is how they approach it.

Google Crawler is not a human being, cannot agree to terms, and does not make use of the article.

There is no exchange going on there--wherein if Google Crawler reads 6 articles, it's gained something at the expense of the Economist.

It's not that advertising is wrong. It's that it is so massively overdone that it makes common web experience unbearable. I now avoid browsing most major sites with my mobile devices that don't have full adblocks - because it'd either completely unusable or even worse, get the whole device stuck and eat half of my battery on the way. I know it's their business model and they don't know any better. It doesn't make it any better for me.

When you have one tasteful ad, it's fine. When you have five, that's too much. When you go to a site and see 50+ foreign domains with ad/tracking/marketing loading, that's cancer. That's not the internet I'd want.

Is this because you have a very old device or just not a good device? I don’t have any ad blocking. I go to sites on an almost 4 year old device and almost 1 year old device. Haven’t had issues with either at all. Not even a slight slowdown.

It's an ok device, just not for displaying 10 animated ads per page.

I think it's pretty clear that, in addition to the very hard sell, it's a design nightmare.

Exactly. One can argue about design but these websites are businesses...they need revenue to perform their functions. If not ads/subscriptions, then what? The use cases of the internet have changed so dramatically over the past 20 years, how can we reasonably expect the same economic model that worked then to apply now?

Opinionated: Using the Economist as the example is especially bad because their articles do provide significant value in contrast to most other paywalle'd blogs!

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