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Comment by cr3ative | Hacker News Reader

So worse than just not supporting sites you visit (via blocking or not clicking), you actively harm their conversion rate on ads, making their slots worth less to networks. Super.

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So maybe that's good if you want to encourage sites to find other business models that don't rely on advertisement.

How many sites would you actually pay for?

I don't know

But I know I will keep blocking ads because they slow down the website and consume a lot of bandwidth

Well, maybe a subscription for every site is not the right business model, we could imagine a lot of different ones. For example, automatic tipping when you spend more than x minutes on a website (something similar to what brave is trying to do), or pay by article (a few cents) on news sites.

Eventually people won't be able to subscribe to every site they want content from obviously. Look at netflix / hulu / amazon videos / youtube red ... It adds up very quickly.

Trying to convince me to set up a subscription upon any visit (and especially upon the first visit) isn't gonna be very effective. It requires thought and some calculations.

"Liked it? Pay me $2" is a way more simple decision to make. If I make it to the end of your content and see a PayPal.me (or Ko-fi) link, there's a reasonable chance I'm going to click on it. I can't say the same for links to Patreon.

There could actually be a sweet spot for ApplePay (and similar service) there. Quick anonymous and secure tips for website.

The ones I would actually use.

None

Most of them. And the ones I wouldn't pay for I wouldn't miss.

I look at it this way: some sites might be worth paying for, none are worth being tracked for or being eye-raped by ads. I don't know why anyone would think it is a good idea to try and make money on something no one is willing to pay for.

About the adnauseam topic: while paywalled sites makes it clear that you need to pay for their content or services, the one with ads don't. You are candidly browsing the web and suddenly they just shove tons of trackers and ads down your browser, no question asked.

This is read by some people as an act of war, who are then motivated to retaliate using weapons like adnauseam. Of course they should just ignore or block the whole websites in questions, but no one can pretend they drew first blood.

I wouldn't really like to manage multiple subscriptions, but what I would be willing to do is pay for membership to a service which offers me access to a wide variety of ad-free websites. Kind of like how a cable subscription gets me access to a large number of channels (but without the commercials).

Shameless plug for Blendle, they provide access to a bunch of news sites with a pay-per-article system. It's a handy way to get around many paywalls without subscribing to many sites individually.

The most useful ones are already free. So, probably none that I don't already. Development resources (free, hosted by companies with incentive to spread the info). Wikipedia. Rarely I still manage to stumble on some non-monetized hobbyist sites, despite their being hard to find under current search algos (infrequent updates, no attention to SEO, no padding things to look like "more unique content per page" to Google), and that's nice.

The rest I already pay for (Netflix, which just barely skates by being so cheap), are essentially utility things (bank sites, government), or are so low-value I'd probably be better off not using them, frankly. Or are simply piracy sites (library genesis / scihub), for that matter.

Any topic I scratch the surface of in online research I end up at excellent, totally free (not ad supported) resources or finding that I need to track down some books, or some combination of the two.

It is not as simple as your one line comment suggests.

Or, more practically, maybe conversion rate just isn’t a good metric for determining the “value of a slot to the network.”

I think it would make the "pay per click" option disappear, leaving only the "pay per view". And you would determine conversion rate from the view, not the click.

This has already happened mostly. CPC ain’t what it used to be.

I think this is an argument you could reasonably make if you give your money to web-sites that you find valuable.

Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".

This would be great if sites you could pay for actually exited. Ad ran sites monopolized the internet.

The argument for me is "I can pay for content with money. It can be zero money or nonzero money but I want to pay with money."

> Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".

You are consuming content from me this very moment, I charge you zero dollars for it. Believe it or not, the web actually was like that at some point: not connecting producers to consumers but connecting human beings, who could produce or consume as they pleased. This was before the people with things to sell arrived.

This kind of shooting-the-shit content is a small subset of what makes the web useful. You are not spending time and money investigating anything of consequence and then reporting it for free, are you? Few people are. We all need to make a living, and a lot of things cannot be done by amateurs alone.

Sure, and thats fair enough. I support a youtuber on patreon for quite a bit more than my share of ad-revenue. His patreons may be a very low percentage of his overall viewers, but even that low-percentage pays more than ad-revenue of all of them

And the beautiful thing about the internet is that you have the control over your own hardware to do something like this. You’re entitled to click, not click, delete, block whatever element on whatever website you want.

I think that would be more valid if paid versions could actually be relied upon to not track or advertise as opposed to being complete greedy morons who think "People willing to pay to not be advertised to? That must be a valueable target to market to!". I seriously wish that was just a strawman.

As long as "merchants" have the option of claiming both it undermines the idea of paying as an alternative which also undermines the paid plus data option. To use a crude but apt simile paying for an escort is paying for silence and discretion - that is why they are more expensive. (Regardless of client and worker sex and/or gender.)

Piracy was a decent demonstration of the hard facts of the (illicit) market - all of the draconian enforcement and DRM didn't make a dent in demand but improved distribution and fairer prices did. Just like how most people don't change their own oil from it being a hassle iTunes and Steam did more to reduce illegal downloads than any enforcement efforts.

Other than sabotage, you can also "encourage" sites to find other business models by visiting other sites instead. You know, the ones that don't rely on advertisement. You might need to pay for those, but that's okay because you support alternative business models.

"Pay money up front, or take all these ads, and no there is NO other way, nu-uh. NO other way. So it is really your choice, but only these 2"

Yeah that is not really a good argument is it?

No, the straw man argument you constructed and I in no way implied is not really a good argument.

Most websites use ads (which contain malware or redirect to scam websites a lot of times), tracking, and sell user data to third party. The point of this addon is to harm these ad networks. I know websites need money to run but most don't even give you the choice. Following a trend is no excuse for doing that in my opinion.

Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium.

Almost the same for redirects, at least for reputable publishers that will be most harmed by this.

This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for.

You can't make decisions at the voting booth without being informed. This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy.

Populism, corruption, and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. But at least you're not being annoyed by some ads.

> This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy.

Ads are an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy. If a news organization depends on ads, advertisers have power over it. Ads make the press less independent.

> Seriously: when was the last time you were infected with malware from ads? This is a talking point from a different millennium.

I still see this very frequently. I work in tech, so broadly speaking, I'm less likely to find my machine infected by malware from ads because I know enough not to fall for their tricks. Smart, but less technical, friends and family end up with malware infected devices all the time due to malvertising.

> This attitude has already resulted in almost all professional, reliable news sources to implement (metered) paywalls. So instead of being informed by dozens of sources, citizens now get their news from just reading the headlines on Facebook, or sometimes the single site they are willing to pay for.

I'd actually posit that the reverse is true. Because advertising pays publishers for reader's eyeballs regardless of the quality of content on their websites, fake news and clickbait are rampant. Harmful news outlets flourish because they don't need to convince anyone to pay for their bullshit stories - just get enough people to click or share. If they relied on users paying to read their stories, I reckon a lot of ad-supported extremist sites would die overnight. There shouldn't be a financial incentive to drive clicks and shares regardless of content quality.

> You can't make decisions at the voting booth without being informed.

True, but that doesn't mean traditional "professional, reliable news sources" are the best (or only) way for people to gain the necessary information. Especially after the massive merging of media businesses over the last few decades, the reliability of these "professionals" has suffered.

> This is such an obvious harm to the fabric of democracy.

You have that backwards; it's surveillance capitalism - that is currently ruining democracy[1].

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-and...

The reason why malware isn't as much of a problem is because of the blocking - it wasn't big class actions or criminal charges that got them to clean up more. The vulnerability is still there so it gets blocked as basic self defense. Malware infections increase conversion rates for the blockers.

Awesome, advertising is terrible.

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