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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

I'm a javascript developer, and I agree heavily with this article.

The web experience has gotten worse these past few years. I don't want a stupid autoplaying video following me around on the damned page. I don't want Facebook to track me endlessly and mastermind what I see.

There are some really cool things the web has gained. WebRTC, ubiquitous web previews, and using mp4s to add cheap animation. I'm also glad Flash has finally been killed off.

We should be focusing on providing well crafted, clean and slim experiences that are thoughtful and not bloated. Get rid of the 10+ trackers, the kitchen sink approaches, and all the cruft that isn't directly useful. At the same time, let's maybe not have a single entity own this slimmed down platform (AMP), but have it be the normal experience.

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The web is designed by marketing people and implemented by programmers. That's because the incentive to fund the implementation comes from the desire to sell things. One of the things that I always found interesting about the web was that as soon as there was a graphical browser, things went in that direction pretty quickly.

Before that, our internet experiences were pretty technical in nature. More than the web, I remember being blown away by mail and news readers, like nn or gnus. The things we built were very practical in nature.

Contrast that to the demo scene. To me, the demo scene epitomises the marriage of technical expertise and artistic endeavour. Talk about "well crafted, clean and slim experiences that are thoughtful and not bloated". Take all that and crank it up to 11 :-) Of course, not necessarily utilitarian.

I'd love to see some artistically inclined people respin some of the concepts of the demo scene and build something practical that also has the ability to floor you from a technical and experience-oriented perspective. Of course, you could never fund it (that's why the marketers dominate the web), but the world of hacking has never needed funding. We're "starving artists" who aren't actually starving because we have high paying side gigs ;-).

> I don't want a stupid autoplaying video following me around on the damned page. I don't want Facebook to track me endlessly and mastermind what I see.

Those autoplaying videos and trackers are the reason these pages are there in the first place. All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way.

It's not as simple as:

> Get rid of the 10+ trackers

Sites like Facebook can't just do that, that's how they make money and stay in business.

This is a business-model problem, not a technical problem. If anything, new technology allowed these business models to be slightly less annoying and damaging to the user experience.

This is an easy argument to make when there's conveniently no way for consumers to decide how they want to pay. Realistically, humans are just lazy about finding decent ways of monetizing their time. I can't say I'll shed any tears if a business relying on ads goes out of business from my ad blocker: they always could have asked me for my cash.

i would like to see stats on that. in my experience people are very hesitant to pay even if they recognize they derive value from your service. it's just not the "thing that everyone does"

IMO this has already been proven to work as long as it's easy to pay. Just think of all the successful phone apps where the paid version is there to remove ads.

> This is an easy argument to make

For the record, I'm not making any value judgement or "argument" here. I'm pointing out that GP's complaining about issues that aren't really technical, but fundamental business practices.

Consumers will pay for the services that consistently deliver value, but most of media out there delivers value occasionally. And that’s assuming some exclusives, where a competing publication is not a click away.

When even the mighty NYT and WSJ have issues monetizing their Web presence, what hope is there for smaller fish?

Do I read an occasional article from The Guardian or Venture Beat? Yeah, happens every now and then. Am I willing to pay for it? Unlikely.

Where media struggles is in spending hundreds of dollars per page of content that has an effective lifespan of about 1 to 5 days before it goes off to the virtual landfill (formerly a real landfill), never to be seen again.

Maybe they need to ditch the daily blog-feed style of journalism and direct their resources toward building a more cohesive/holistic archive of events that provides some lasting interest and value, so they won't need to desperately squeeze revenue from each article as aggressively as possible before the aggregators drop it.

I think they try to. But it might be that it is actually much cheaper to write small daily articles that junior people can write than to write extensive high quality stuff. That puts you under constant pressure.

Which is precisely why they have a problem with monetizing. I can't really sympathise with that. Why should I care if the business model of flooding people with crap, occasionally containing some gems, is in trouble? Drop the crap, drop the frequency, send only gems when you have them.

Well that goes against attention economy we have today. Slow news are not news. I think what you want are magazines. It is precisely why they are not dead. In fact they had dip but now they are growing again.

Economist Espresso is an excellent example of this in action.

I think a bunch of smart people have spent a bunch of time on it and what we have currently simply makes the most money. Of course that may change once the majority block ads.

Consumers have basically already decided. How many people use incognito windows to get around the NYT paywall, for example?

Still waiting for the Spotify of news sites. I guess it's harder than it is for music?

It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing). I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?).

[1] https://blendle.com

At least for my part Blendle has been a huge win for publishers. I've probably spent more money on Blendle articles in just a year or so (even asking for my money back a number of times) than I have on regular subscriptions.

Considering the fact that I'm generally not too interested in mainstream news, and somewhat frugal, I imagine there's quite a number of people who spend even more.

Spotify to the music industry is like putting some ice on a broken neck. The music industry at least has concerts and merchandise to drive revenues up.

The problem is that news is very expensive to produce; particularly investigative journalism that might or might not pay off. Local news at the town or suburb level has a similar issue, where the market is quite small to begin with. Strip away the expensive parts and you're left with cheapo aggregator papers. But what happens when there's nothing left to aggregate?

Yeah, it is a business model problem. My solution is to not visit sites that have this business model for most needs. Sometimes I tolerate it for specific content, but mostly I try to stick to text-based sites.

Perhaps governments could make ad driven revenue illegal, force the internet to drop that particular business model.

Get rid of false free.

And eliminate access to ad-supported services that many - especially the poor - would no longer have access to. No ads is just as dumb as all ads.

Any examples?

BTW, back in the 90s there were a ton of free sites, no ads. Mainly hobbyist sites etc. No reason that still can't happen.

These sites are still there. In fact, many more of them, since the cost of hosting has dropped to near zero, especially for static content.

The new development is huge sites providing expensive content and services for free, and using ads and tracking to pay for it.

It's part of the natural move towards a centralized web. You want a website you can trust that delivers good content, as do other people, increasing the load on the host beyond minimal finance resulting in ads. That said a lot of sites aren't that trustworthy and don't deliver good content but are riddled with ads to try and make money

Besides the entire news industry? YouTube? Most informational sites besides Wikipedia? How about Google Search? Believe it or not, it costs money to run a business and not everything makes sense as a subscription model or pay-as-you-go.

I'm building this whole platform with tens of thousands of lines of code, which (in my opinion) is pretty unique, I use it every day with a couple of people that visit, but it's designed to handle much more. I'm not getting anything in terms of money out of it, if anything I'm losing money by hosting and stuff. I'll leave the link here: https://github.com/madprops/Hue . Also there's other successful open source solutions that are having a big impact right now, like Mastodon, it's a very active Twitter alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)

This is offtopic but I just have a small suggestion for Hue - When I checked it out, it required me to login/register right away. It would be nice if you could provide a demo version where one can check out the service without having to register first.

A half-way house which could be interesting to explore would be to make advertising “static” again, i.e. all visitors to a given page see the same ads, or at least one of the same ad-rotation with the same probability distribution. The intrusiveness and complexity mostly seem to come from targeting ads against visitors rather than page content.

There are still a few sites which run simple static “someone paid us and we edited in a link using notepad” style ads. Frankly, they’re higher quality and more likely to be relevant than anything that comes through the big ad-targeting networks.

(I’d vaguely hoped GDPR might have this effect. In fact, it just seems to mean business as usual with a slightly increased floor on the amount of process and bureaucracy...)

Does Facebook have 10+ ad trackers? You're logged in. They have plenty of engineers optimizing performance.

This seems more likely for news sites that are desperate for revenue and use multiple ad networks.

Does autoplaying videos make more money or just push up meaningless metrics? Personally, an autoplaying video means an instant back button press or tab close.

It does for certain demographics especially when you take into account how little people read these days.

> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way.

This is false. We had a perfectly healthy ecosystem before ads invaded the web. In most ways it was better because it was built by people who cared, rather than by companies who wanted to extract money and power from their visitors.

But is it sustainable that way?

>>> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way.

>> This is false. We had a perfectly healthy ecosystem before ads invaded the web. In most ways it was better because it was built by people who cared, rather than by companies who wanted to extract money and power from their visitors.

> But is it sustainable that way?

Yes. It'd be different, but sustainable. Sites like Wikipedia are proof of that.

It baffling that people claim that the web requires ads and trackers to survive when a counterexample is one of the top three links on nearly all of their searches.

Doesn't Wikipedia run on donations? Or are you saying you think that works for the majority of sites?

It does. No, that would not make sense of the majority of sites. Majority of sites have limited audience (topically, or geographically), so costs would be nowhere as high, and could be handled by personal input + donations (for private sites), or written off as marketing expense (for company sites).

Yes, websites do not have to pay for themselves directly. The idea they should is underlying lots of current web problems.

> It baffling that people claim that the web requires ads and trackers to survive when [obviously it can]

It's a question of the content you put in the word "web". As a corrolary: I believe that "TV" would not exist without advertising.

I know that electomagnetic radiation, signal processing, and ray tubes are wholly orthogonal to Kelloggs selling cereal. But the modern television media landscape and its dedication to Brave New World style audience-capture is unfathomable without people splashing money at it to sell things.

So what is "the web"? Telnet, TCP, and HTTP? We don't need your stinking banners! We have oodles of excess server bandwidth and our websites are rarely more than 10K (of gorgeous hand-crafted fully-accessible HTML, natch).

But is "the web" your advertiser-supported newspaper? Your advertiser-supported searches? Your advertiser-supported social media news feed? Your advertiser-supported free phone app? Your advertiser-supported image host? Those things are, so far, only sustainably available through advertising.

Crack the micro-currency and micro-valuation code for everyone online and maybe that "web" can live without ads... we're not there yet though :)

> Those things are, so far, only sustainably available through advertising.

Really? Then I guess sites and creators that are sponsored via donations never got that memo.

We have plenty of money coming in via ethical channels. Sure, not as much as with asdvertising, but IME, most sites have severely bloated budgets compared to what they actually need for sustainability, and thats why we have the problems that exist today.

You've moved goal-posts ;)

Sorry, but there are no donation based major national news organizations or donation based search titans with historically large market caps or donation based social media empire whose CEOs political whims shake national elections the world round. Facebook, Google, PictureHostOfTheMoment, and the media giants with traditional business models are the essence of what most people are using their time on online. That's "the web" for most people most of the time.

I mean... Grab a random high-schoolers phone and see what percentage of services they're using are (in)directly funded by advertising and advertisers.

Your observations about the economics of the bulk of web-development are probably correct, but relatively minor compared to the mega-billions in suboptimal efficiency in every other aspect of those organizations... And the issue is always that "sustainability" is not growth, and growing frequently requires actions that are unsustainable in the long-term to achieve. Businesses grow, transition, and reshape themselves within the context of new revenue streams, and acquiring those new revenue streams is how you make owners richer and secure any desired financing.

So yeah, really, as of todays date "the web", a la "TV", is a pure advertising apparatus to capture audience and move product with peripheral benefits in political manipulation. Other models have not been validated by the market, nor consumers. Remember we all want ads, in the abstract.

> You've moved goal-posts ;)

> Sorry, but there are no donation based major national news organizations or donation based search titans with historically large market caps or donation based social media empire whose CEOs political whims shake national elections the world round. Facebook, Google, PictureHostOfTheMoment, and the media giants with traditional business models are the essence of what most people are using their time on online. That's "the web" for most people most of the time.

Actually, I think you're the one that's moved them. I don't think anyone can claim that we'd get a clone of today's web if we took tracking and advertising out of the picture. However, that doesn't mean we wouldn't get a different web that was good and valuable. We might even get something that's more valuable than today's. Projects like Wikipedia prove that extraordinary valuable things can be built online from volunteer labor and donations. If you personally need every idea to be validated by the market, then that's your validation.

You went from "isn't sustainable" to "has to be a worldwide major economic and political powerhouse" and claim that I'm the one that moved the goalposts?

lol, ok

Web build by people who care and don't earn money on it still exists. Its audience is smaller proportion of total audience then it used to be.

And also, people who care want pay raise too. They enjoy living in better flat, going at better holidays, buying better bicycle for children or eventually have periods of life where it is impossible to have job, family and time consuming hobby at the same time.

Who said they couldn't be paid? Patreon, kickstarter, etc show that you can do what you care about and still make money ethically.

I very intentionally wrote "pay raise" instead of "some minimal amount of money".

Also, both succesfull patreon and succesfull kickstarter require significant effort to pull off. You have to create materials, build community and promote promote and so on. It is a lot of managerial work.

We are not talking about "buy third yacht" level of money here. We are talking about "I can finally afford dentist or something else basic" amount of money here. It makes difference in people's lives.

Are you suggesting that everyone who wants a pay raise deserves it just because they can build a website? If so, then I want a pay raise. But I'm unwilling to sacrifice my users' security and privacy to do it.

Nobody said it was easy to raise money. If it was, everyone would do it.

Crowdfunding and donations make plenty if money to afford a dentist or other basic needs. There are plenty of full-time groups making money with it. I don't know why you think thats not possible when it is already happening.

You are changing the topic. It started with false dichotomy between ads and caring for content and continued through "this form of monetization is more effective then the other one". I am suggesting that using "want money" as dirty word as if it wad something people (who don't even earn a lot) should be ashamed off is manipulative false argument.

Most crowdfunding campaigns fail. Most pay for medical campaigns fail. Most including those succesfull don't earn enough to be full time.

Inspirational feel good article about succesfull campaign is not representative of average case.

Can you point to where I said that wanting more money is a "dirty word"? Or can you point to where I said it was wrong to want more money? I don't see anything like that in any of my posts, and I certainly don't believe that to be true.

Most advertisement based sites fail. Does that mean we should also abandon that model?

Nobody said that the average campaign should succeed. I definitely don't believe that.

You can't just keep putting words into my mouth and then claim that I am the one changing the topic.

> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way.

This is blatantly false... Significant quantities of digital work product are produced for free with little concern for payment.

Perhaps you meant "most" or "the majority of" or even "significant quantities"?

WhatsApp showed us that running a paid, low cost, privacy oriented service can be profitable.

I'd probably pay for that, again, as soon as they were completely untied from Facebook and had apologized. (Yep, they made a very public promise.)

I'd probably pay similar or slightly larger amounts for a number of other things as well (actually I do, so my point is rather that I'd pay for for stuff :)

Now before anyone thinks: "great, lets paywall all the things!" here's an important catch:

1. I'm happy to pay for my newspaper. I'm happy to buy the occasional newspaper on a newspaper stand.

I do not want to subscribe to every newspaper that anyone shares a link to, just to read one single thing that is relevant to me. I love the idea of blendle but it seems media (and my feeling is even a lot of HNers) don't get it.

2. I'm happy to pay a certain large cloud company that I don't like as much as I used to do for an increased storage quota. I'm happy to pay reasonable amounts for apps, services etc. I'm happy to pay for usage for things I use less often. I particularly like the Jetbrains model of pay-to-own (even if I personally prefer their competitors products. ;-)

I still do not want every app to pretend they are a service that I should pay a monthly fee for.

Also: I don't really mind relevant ads. The other day I actually clicked on one. Because it was relevant.

But there is no reason to track me around the web: most ads I ever clicked on voluntarily (that would be 5 - 10 for the last 10 years ;-) could probably be inferred from context: I was reading a blog post about something related or searching for something related.

Also (and here I go against many HNers), ads should preferably be injected server side.

Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article.

I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.

That's sad to hear. (Not using Blendle on a daily basis.)

I was always waiting for more articles to get available on Blendle, but if pricing is going through the roof it will be harder to recommend.

I'd love to be able to support individual authors, or 'collectives', regardless of where they publish. I suppose that's hard for Blendle to arrange though.

> This is a business-model problem, not a technical problem.

The technical solution would be to introduce a highly optimized first-class browser API "just send everything I do to these trackers" without JS or including remote scripts.

Browser vendors adding thin veneers of security (while also introducing side channels) and web developers finding ways of circumventing these mechanisms, with some of these circumvention mechanisms being standardized again is a bizarre ritual dance that benefits no one. (Add to this the fact that the biggest browser vendor is also the biggest beneficiary of the whole ad racket.)

There's another profit model on the web, and it usually involves the user just entering their credit card. Hell, it doesn't even need all of them to do that, just enough. I absolutely use services like Patreon to support artists who make all their work available for free. I tip open source projects (usually every time I install it on a new PC). I happily pay for decent email.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter don't seem truly sustainable, and they aren't free.

> I'm also glad Flash has finally been killed off.

I actually think JavaScript video has been worse for users. Flash was easily blockable and worked fine for the majority of users. It was developers and Apple's need for control that killed off Flash.

Flash was a battery hog. HTML5 video is less so.

How much of that is codec driven?

There is no 'HTML5 video'. There is an HTML5 tag that indicates a video object, which is delivered using the same codecs that Flash used.

All that changed is that the UI moved into the browser.

Well designed software focused on user happiness doesn't make money. All those things that we hate, they are put in there because they make money.

> Software was never about making users happy, it was about tricking users, manipulating them into giving you either their money or their time

Calm down a bit with your generalities. If you sell the software (or the platform it runs on), there is no manipulation or trickery involved. It's only the "vast majority" if you look at freeware/ad-based.

You're right. I deleted that part of my comment. It was more ranty than I prefer to be. And I had things like Google and Facebook in mind, and 99% of the free games on the App Store or web.

One example in the article is code.gov, the video is impressive, the loading time on the Android Go device abysmal. And this has nothing to do with earning money. It is just bad software.

Actually come to think of it, I've made some open source apps that people asked if they could donate to, because they were so excited by the possibilities my apps created, and by the convenience they now had because of them. I created a Patreon for this but have yet to link to it anywhere because I keep sinking into cynicism from all the ways I haven't been able to make money. But that's not the attitude I had when I created my window managers. Software that focuses on user-happiness can make money through donations. Just, probably not a full-time income.

EDIT: Apparently that's not true, you can make a full time income. Godot makes $10k per month in donations. And a month ago it was $8k. Wow.

Please post your Patreon link or a link to the link.

My patreon is on my HN profile, but I plan to put it in the readme of a new open source window manager I've been working on when I announce it. I figured out a way to emphasize ease of use and user experience so much more than I was able to with Mjolnir or Phoenix. It's really exciting and I think it'll make automation a lot more accessible for a lot more macOS users.

To add to the list of programmers making money- Evan You, creator of VueJS, makes around $11,000 on Patreon. The creator of the CSS library Bulma makes several hundred dollars, and the Quasar Framework makes a couple thousand.

Evan actually makes $16k/month [1]. Wow. If only I could figure out how to make a quarter of that from my open source work, I'd be in business.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

When you say “make money”, there is a problem. Maximal efficiency does not necessarily correlate with making money. Are bloated and obnoxious ads making money? Depends on who you ask. And on what metrics we are using to determine actual value added.

One could make the argument that ads are as much of a waste of energy as mining on a proof-of-work blockchain. There is an implicit subsidy and externality in both cases.

Did you actually perform experiments to substantiate your claim? As in: Do you have numbers that clearly show that there is a net benefit when you make the user experience as bad as it is today?

This is specifically applicable to content distribution. For products with paying customers the exact opposite is true. That’s not to say every company that makes a product will be good at it, but good UX absolutely does drive profits.

How about iOS?

I'd argue that's well designed software which is focused (albeit not exclusively) on user happiness.

Apple leaves a lot on the table when determining what to monetize and what trade-offs to make to avoid making users uncomfortable or infringing on their privacy.

Is that benevolence? No, but it doesn't have to be.

There are some really cool things the web has gained

I'd like to here about these things, if any. I'll generously assume you aren't seriously referring to "web previews" or animations.

I'm also glad Flash has finally been killed off

No, that's an absolute tragedy. Some of the youngsters here might not be aware, but there was a time when 99 percent of the garbage in a website could be turned off with a single blocker, all without impacting anything necessary.

yep. wishing Flash to be gone is misguided.

I liked flash too, but it being owned by Adobe killed it. If it was open, I'd be a lot more sad about it dying.

It wouldn’t have died if it were open. It would have been improved and more secure.

Ask anyone who've lived in the world of java applets how the rise of flash was awesome at the time. It was great for a lot of things, but unfortunately, like many things in life (javascript?), people abused it.

> 99 percent of the garbage in a website could be turned off with a single blocker, all without impacting anything necessary

I was there and I remember no such thing. On the contrary, I remember people building whole sites in Flash. Killing that off is a Good Thing.

I think the problem with the web is too much freedom given by tools for free, which leads to such maddening abuse as Flash was in the past, and modern web development is today. Publishers have too much capability, and too much control over the rendering of content.

Don't forget our good friends ActiveX , ShockWave(whose relationship to Flash I've never been able to determine), and RealPlayer, which had an uncanny ability to be required for every online class assignment I ever had. If you were hapless enough to be running a Linux desktop, as I was, then have fun!

The modern JavaScript experience might be a bloated disaster, but at least it's a cross-platform disaster.

I had forgotten about real player. It was so awful...

Shockwave was the player for content packaged for web from Macromedia Director, a product focused on creating multimedia binaries, often distributed on CD.

Shockwave had much more powerful video and 3D rendering capabilities than Flash, but Director arguably died after Macromedia failed to deliver a timely OSX port.

> I remember people building whole sites in Flash.

Like some kind of Single Page App that takes forever to download, breaks the back button and has obfuscated source code? Lucky we're past that phase!

Yes, but with Flash pages scrolling rarely worked at all (people were too lazy to implement it), text wasn't searchable or copy-pastable, and no keyboard shortcuts worked, anywhere.

JS SPAs are bad, but not that bad, because browser defaults are sane, and getting around them is hard. Or in other words, web starts working by default, and developers have to work to break it. Flash had no defaults, you started with blank slate and implement everything yourself.

> No, that's an absolute tragedy. Some of the youngsters here might not be aware, but there was a time when 99 percent of the garbage in a website could be turned off with a single blocker, all without impacting anything necessary.

Some of the youngsters here might not be aware, but there was a time when sites could reliably send raw TCP and UDP through a popular plugin that implemented a different, and weaker, version of the same-origin policy than the browser did. (For example, in earlier versions of Flash, any video could send anything to any port > 1024 on its hosting server!)

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