Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

This is excessive. Amazingly so.

I don't mind an ad or two. I don't want you siphoning my network and computational resources without compensation.

I think the news sites are thinking the same thing. "I don't want you to use my network and computational resources (to read the news) without compensation (watching our ads/mining our coin/etc)"

In that case, these news businesses should not be publishing content on the World Wide Web. Users pay for devices, electricity, and monthly network connection, These publishers seem to be stuck in the last epoch. A website is not a finished product like a book or newspaper, it is publicly-accessible data. Users can scrape, restyle, delete, and add content _at will_ whenever they choose to download this content.

So the ideology of capital, which destroyed community morals, is now having it's own tawdry ethics trashed. It's not news that the news is failing. This Author Wrote 7 Reasons Why You Can't Make 20th Century Business Web-Scale.

So what's the impetus for the news business to be available online? If the world wide web should be a free love utopia of data slurping why would these agencies, who have been built on the assumption that the creation and presentation of their data has an inherent worth? How do they get remunerated for their efforts? Or do they just never try to take advantage of this new epoch and die off, leaving us with a billion half-assed citizen journalists?

I would pay for a source of journalism that had any actual effort put in it and wasn't blatantly and hilariously wrong almost all of the time. Sadly news agencies don't fit that bill at all.

So do you/would you pay for something like the New York times?

Read reuters, you don't have to pay for it.

I see nothing wrong with them charging money for their work they just can't depend on being able to exercise absolute control over the presentation because instead of being dumb data to be displayed on a remote device its code to be run on the end users device.

You can't separate all the interesting aspects of this distinction and ignore the ones you don't like.

You are being compensated. You can visit their website and read their content. Feel you're not being compensated enough? Stop visiting that site.

You are being compensated...but you are not being informed for what.

As an example, lets say you borrow my truck. You compensate me for the use of my truck to move some boxes in town.

But then you use my truck to tow a trailer across the country. That is more wear and tear on the vehicle.

And then you take my personal information that is on my vehicle registration with my home address and sell that to an ad company.

Finally you return my truck with all sorts of junk that was collected while the truck was being used.

Except it is nothing like that.

When you go to a website are your informed how much bandwdith will be ad only?

How about what is done with your personal information?

When you visit a website are you shown which tracking cookies will be left behind?

You cannot stop visiting the site, once you have visited the ads have been loaded, the cookies have been dropped and your info has been mined.

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