Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration

And I want to be compensated for writing HN comments. Alas, just because I want to be compensated for something, doesn't mean I will be. Content producers feeling entitled to compensation for their free and public content are kind of forgetting the content consumers have agency too.

> and the industry agreed upon best way to do that for serving a mainstream audience is to publish free content with supporting ads.

Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not wrong. Just because it worked for now, doesn't mean it'll keep on working. Nobody is entitled to their business model working forever, or at all.

> Wait so instead of doing what they're good at, content producers should individually be tasked with investing their resources in experimenting with different economic models to try find a viable alternative to serving content without ads?

Yes. They have the content, and want to exchange it for money. It's literally their job to figure out how to do this.

> The sites with a large enough content catalog are already doing this with subscriptions, some others are using patreon

Good. As it should be.

> consider utilizing their ad-free content alternative when available instead of cutting off their only revenue source.

Again, not my responsibility. Especially given that the social contract of the Web is, by design, that if your server responds with 200 OK + data, I get to render that data however I like.

Content creators have been acting like assholes and now they're seeing the consequences.

Crying crocodile tears of unfairness won't change that, it's just wasting people's time. If those content creators can't get people to pay for their content, it means their content is worthless.

Choice of revenue source is, well, a choice. It's not like we're talking about some poor third-world kids, for whom the only choice is between starvation and building ad-powered content farms. It's all just people who asked themselves, "how can I make me some money?", and out of countless of possible business models, chose this particular one, which is giving stuff away for free, attaching a malicious secondary payload to it, and hoping that this secondary payload will generate some money.

> No the web is not a social contract, it's a combination of technologies.

It's that combination of technologies that create this contract. Those technologies create a particular platform, with particular set of rules. It provides ways of giving things away, as well as asking for compensation. It provides ways of saying "strings attached". Unfortunately, many people choose to use the "give things away, no strings attached" path and then, after giving a thing away, demand to be paid. And it's even fine, as long as they realize many people will just brush their latter demand away, as it's silly and improper.

> The implicit social contract is for Content producers to create content consumers want which is consumed in the way they want their content served.

Oh, no no no. Not the last part. Why on Earth I, as a consumer, would agree to a producer dictating how I consume the content after I get it? I have the right to consume it the way I want, and the Web tech stack is built around preserving this right. The producer's right is to structure the content for particular consumption. A paywall, or showing ads before content, or dumping it all in a PDF, is a way of doing that. The consumer's right is to destructure what they get and consume it the way they like.

(As an analogy - if a restaurant wants me to not eat tomatoes, it's free to offers only meals without them. But it would be ridiculous for them to serve me tomatoes and then have a waiter hovering over me, ensuring I don't eat them. Or a waiter dictating I have to eat all of the things on my plate, and in a particular sequence.)

> Great, then use it when that option is available, as a benefit you wont see ads and producers get compensated.

Offer it to me, and I shall use it if I want your content badly enough, or not use it and go elsewhere. That's fair.

> I hope you're not naive enough to think that a paywall works for all content and all audiences?

I'm not. Fortunately, there are alternatives, including donations/patronage, or writing your content off as marketing expense for something else (e.g. articles published for free in hope you'll buy the author's book on the same topic, or just publishing in order to gather trust and goodwill).

(EDIT: and also, there's the elephant in the room - a lot of content can exists solely because of ads. Or, in other words, it couldn't be monetized in any other way. Why? Because it's crap. If that content dies off completely, I say good riddance.)

> there's a reason why ad-supported free content is used, it's not because it's easier, it's because it's viable

It's viable for now (and becoming less so, hence all the whining about ad-blockers). But so is polluting rivers when you're running a factory. Just because something is viable, doesn't mean it's good.

   The implicit social contract is for Content producers to create content consumers want which is consumed in the way they want their content served. 

I certainly agree with you that content producers should have a mechanism for the possibility of revenue, but this is a two way street. Advertising networks have worked for some things , but are becoming more and more invasive, and hence more and more problematic. If enough people reject the model, content producers need to be either looking for a new model or looking for ways to improve this one. This stuff isn't rocket science.