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Comment by zulgan | Hacker News Reader

Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing, I thought it was nothing.

Now we have to suffer fake content, incredibly well researched click-baits, short term conversion optimized (good trailer, bad content) media and of course tracking to incredible extend. Every single machine learning algorithm trying to push us to more extreme world views so we stay on the platform to consume more contend and see more ads.

Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. Few weeks ago it hit me, that I sold her mind, because I did not pay, and now everything is beyond repair.

PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. /

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We suffer that garbage not because people like you and me did not think of _money_ as reward for other people's projects but because of advertising, tracking and click counts.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing things for free, doing things for free and consuming things for free. The best content on the web is done by people from their own interest in sharing. Personal contacts, exchange of information, feedback and community are so much more worth than money when it comes to motivating the production of good things.

Also paying for things has a low success rate in reducing advertising - a customer who will pay for something is a good target to advertise more too.

Paywalls are a great alternative to intrusive ads for a larger publisher. NYT has been doing very well the last couple of years on their digital subscription model.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...

Your point may be valid, but the NYT is a poor example of paywalls as an alternative to intrusive ads.

I'm a paying subscriber to the NYT. When I open their homepage now, the page is split horizontally with an ad taking up about 40%-50% of the entire screen. The "The New York Times" header is about halfway down the page, and the first actual content probably starts at 85% or even below that.

Anecdotally, the NYT runs even more intrusive ads than this to paid subscribers. Off the top of my head, I would say their modal popup video ad is the worst.

For the past few days I’ve also been unable to read articles on the NYT app without the page jumping around to load ads as I scroll. And I’m a subscriber to boot. I’ve a Pihole on the network and it still isn’t a tolerable experience.

I've been thinking about subscribing. Do ad blockers take care of this?

Agreed, see basic cable tv

Part of this is just the plethora of content. There's too much content, too much to savor and focus on. There's always something new, but there's too much to retain. If you were starved for content, you'd pay for it more often, and you'd enjoy it more often.

When consuming, it's never for free, unless it's a hobby.

Look at the Hacker News homepage right now and count the websites and projects created and maintained as hobbies. If it's not a hobby and it's not paid, then the content you're viewing is an advertisement.

From an economic point of view, the problem with free content is that it's killing the paid alternatives. This is capitalism and in terms of price it's a race to the bottom. And you can't beat a zero price tag.

Just an example, how many visitors of Hacker News still use a @gmail.com email address or a free Dropbox account? By my estimation it's the vast majority, judging by the comments I've been reading. So we are talking about a demographic that earns well (compared with the average) and that doesn't blink when paying for lattes, but that is unable to pay for services that keep their email or data safe. And then you see people outraged whenever new limits are imposed on the free accounts, which is quite unbelievable.

Not trying to shame anyone in particular here and I understand that this is simply how the market works, my rant is basically about human nature. We consume, but we never learned to give back unless we are forced and you can see this in everything we do, like for example in our relationship with nature. In my mind the problems with the environment that we've created are the same problem.

this was exactly my thought when I made https://scrambled-eggs.xyz/ , now I pay for gmail, google calendar, photos and etc way more than money

It’s like visual zModem...

Ads are not avoided in the long run by paying for a service. Advertisers and businesses maximise revenue by expanding to the point where revenue = costs.

This is why ads appeared on cable TV. Why ads appear in the economist magazine even though its a premium paid product. Why celebrities shill products and there's product placement even though you pay to see movies and they already recieve multi-million dollar pay-cheques.

The only effective way to fight back against advertising is to go on the offensive: teach people to notice and avoid and react against advertising, produce content without it, switch off and do not use services that use it and support services that take a stand, destroy their tech or use it against them, change the relative cost of their activities so they retreat from various spheres, or use society and government to shame, ban or disrupt their activity.

So if its worth anything, you don't have to feel bad about selling your daughter's mind by not paying. That's like the sheep thinking they can placate the wolf by just giving a taste of blood and hoping he'll be satiated...

/apparently I'm in a radical place :P But having said that, I would also advocate paying people who do good things and produce good content for the world, assuming the market and your situation lets you...

> destroy their tech or use it against them

This seems ethically suspect, possibly illegal. Can you elaborate?

Not the OP, but I think ad blockers do 'destroy ad tech'. Not literally, but as outcome, if everybody would use them.

the real world is complex, so I expect each person to think about the ethics of their actions for themselves.

however, that being said, I personally would consider many forms of advertising ethically suspect today (without coming into the debate of what constitutes advertising).

So all I'm saying is, if a mugger comes at you with a knife, or there's a dark alley, or someone places a GPS tracker on your car without your consent, or someone bombarded you with messages about how you're not sexy enough or your kids are stupid and you're a bad parent if you don't buy X because they profile you, then you can (and probably should) break or take the muggers arm/gun/ķnife, light the dark alleyway, smash the GPS tracker or reprogram it out send it fake signals, block their messages/throw them in the bin/destroy them respectively.

You often hear messages about how people are obligated to watch/respect/load advertisements from advertisers, and this is just patently absurd, especially on the web and in public places.

I have no ethical problems myself with using ad blockers or technology to waste the resources of advertisers, trackers and telemarketers. at what point you take to the streets and start defacing billboards, covering signs, tearing propaganda down, disabling severs, breaking screens etc, I can't say without context, but I would say from my perspective civil and active disobedience certainly isn't inherently non-ethical. private property rights do not trump all other rights or civil responsibilities in a reasonable and ethical society.

Thanks for this interpretation. My first reaction was to associate destruction with physical violence or aggressive DDOS style actions. Other, more soft protests do seem more reasonable; though not entirely comfortable with then myself.

> Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets.

Just so you know, the audiobook of 1984 you linked to on YouTube is the same narration as the one I purchased from Audible.

"The best time to start respecting intellectual property rights is 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

I don't think that paying for content would have stopped the tracking.

Or the advertising.

In my opinion, there is no limit to man's greed. Whether that's a good or a bad thing for humanity, time will tell.

Look at what cable TV became. Originally ad free because you were paying for it, but 'amoral optimization for profits balanced on the knife edge of the frustration of your audience through advertising barrage' is what any media company feels it must now do to survive.

"How are you going to beat Joe's numbers from last quarter?"

I think this is all emergent behavior coming from the self-interests of the many participants.

> Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her.

I hear you. While it may be impossible to stop the tracking or the fingerprinting, I follow the steps below to somewhat limit the damage from the cesspool that is Youtube.

  - No Youtube Kids app
  - I use the iPhone app on which I have a setting to "Pause Watch History" and "Pause Search History"
  - Clear the watch history once my son is finished viewing( this is weird I know considering the above setting but I've found it helps )
  - I stream the video to the TV so that my kid doesn't keep swiping on random crap
  - I and my wife have a plan to wean him off Youtube by making him watch something like NatGeo on TV.

Edit: formatting.

Why are you opposed to the YouTube Kids app? I haven’t seen it, nor do I have kids, but if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable.

> if your choice is YouTube or YouTube Kids, I would assume the latter is far preferable.

It is intuitive to think of it that way,yes but my friends have had bad experiences with what it recommends. In addition, reading articles like this[1] somewhat makes me feel wary about living with a false sense of security. I figure I'm better off with Youtube (I don't consume content on this. So no recommendations from my viewing habits)

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/parent...

I'm an SRE who never worked on YouTube and a parent of two. From what I gathered, YouTube Kids is made by passionate people, who are trying their best. But the question of "is this video good for kids" seems to be genuinely hard. Hence, I prefer to show my kids videos that I had a chance to curate myself. In a pinch I will let them watch YouTube, but only if I'm in range to preempt once they leave the range of sanity for their age group. I still strongly prefer YT to TV though.

Personally, I'm setting up a NAS in anticipation of my kid reaching the age in which we'll allow her to watch kid videos. Streaming stuff you manually curated and youtube-dl'ed to serve over LAN solves all problems with YouTube.

Great idea! One word of advice though: Kids get bored very very soon. Better have a large and good collection of videos :-)

I'll be trying to keep up with dumping URLs into the downloading script. Right now, we do have a couple series in mind of the TV shows from our childhood, back when kid cartoons weren't meant to push merchandise; it should last for a little while :).

Taking off my nostalgia-colored glasses, every cartoon I remember watching as a kid pushed merchandise in some form or another, even if it was only the licensed character figures and graphic tee-shirts.

It has been a long while since I have seen Woody Woodpecker, Chilly Willy, or Tom and Jerry in stores, though. I hated The Flintstones and The Jetsons, and never watched reruns of them. By the time we got GI Joe, MASK, Jem, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, He-Man, Care Bears, Thundercats, Voltron, etc. they were just wall-to-wall toy ad. That saturation ad-bombing backed off as cable TV ramped up, because then you could get Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

Classic Looney Tunes; Tiny Toon Adventures; The Real Ghostbusters; Robotech; Animaniacs; Batman: the Animated Series; Rugrats; Doug; Hey, Arnold!; Rocko's Modern Life; CatDog; Ed, Edd, and Eddy; Dexter's Laboratory; Cow and Chicken; I Am Weasel; Ren and Stimpy; Powerpuff Girls; Freakazoid; Spongebob Squarepants; Avatar: the Last Airbender; Ducktales; Rescue Rangers; Adventures of the Gummi Bears; TaleSpin; Darkwing Duck; Goof Troop; Phineas and Ferb; Gravity Falls; The Proud Family; Kim Possible; Star vs. the Forces of Evil; Homestar Runner; Wallace and Gromit.

Those ought to keep anybody's kids off YouTube.

> Taking off my nostalgia-colored glasses, every cartoon I remember watching as a kid pushed merchandise in some form or another, even if it was only the licensed character figures and graphic tee-shirts.

I'll guess that's because you lived in the US :). I grew up in a post-Soviet country; for all the downsides they had, at least our cartoons were really top-notch and not yet touched by commercialization. You can bet that Reksio the dog, or Krecik the mole, or Filemon the cat weren't pushing any merchandise. They were just relaxing cartoons for children.

(In the 90s we had some western classics in private TV stations too; I watched plenty of Dexter's Lab, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Tom&Jerry, Wile E. Coyote & the Road Runner, etc. Somewhere around pre-teens we got access to Nickelodeon/Fox Kids, and I got my fair taste of Marvel & DC-based animations too. Most of that I'd consider a-ok for my kid.)

I'm wondering what ages both of you have in mind. Up to some point, they seem to be happy to watch the same season of their favourite series in a loop.

I know some adults who at 21 and 30 y.o. are still happy watching the same couple seasons of Friends on a loop, day in, day out, so this may not always depend on age :).

youtube-dl can take a playlist or channel as the URL and download the latest videos from pre-approved sources, so you can curate and also have plenty of fresh videos. Combined with Plex, this works really well for kids.

That's exactly what a friend and I (but mostly him) built. He has two kids, I think 6 and 4 now, and he's got a simple website accessible in his Lan that has kids stuff grouped by show with big thumbnails. It's remembering what has already been watched, and last we talked about it he wanted to limit watchtime per day. I mostly built the crude parent interface where you create new categories and paste links to pages you wanna scrape with youtube-dl. He's planning to put it on github eventually after removing all the hard coded stuff...

That sounds pretty neat. I'd love to set the code when he's ready to share.

Same here

> PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. /

If you don't mind that dark place becoming even darker may I suggest:

- Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society" https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

and his other book "Propaganda" https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512

this is basically what drove Ted Kaczynski to a place of no return https://archive.org/details/TechnologicalSlaveryTheCollected...

thank you!

Or read Bucky Fuller and "Permaculture Designer's Manual" and cheer up.

Good stuff, thanks!

I read Propaganda and got scared after realizing to what extend it engulfs your life, whether you know it or not, need it or not. That partly, States are helpless but to employ it, that partly it's the individual's need for it that drives them. Think about it for a moment, our craving to be "informed", drives it too.

Then I started reading The Technological Society and it is very,very depressing. You start questioning your sanity that why is it that the rest of the world doesn't see it that way :). Read it half way and haven't had the courage to return to it. When almost everything you do comes within the realm of the inanimate process driving towards efficiency, it makes you wonder if there is any point to it. It becomes difficult to function. Like the other commentator said, one needs some antidote to this aspect of reality. I really wish something like that existed. Meditating on the Tao helped, Stoicism helps. Being with kids helps as they seem to be unaware of these things. But you feel helpless that they will grow into it and inherit it.

But again, glad I read them. Ellul lays it out really well with such clarity. If 1984 feels like a rainy day, Ellul is being alone in the Arctic winter.

The only way is to voluntarily, consciously, and simply reject it. Not to be a slave to efficiency, information. And start to rebuild again with this new understanding.

I make an effort to pay to remove ads wherever possible. Some apps I've paid for: Spotify, Weather Underground, DuoLinguo, a sudoku game on my phone, words with friends (back when I paid it was $5, now it's like $20 I think but would still be worth it IMO considering I play it every day).

I firmly believe the only way out of this advertising dystopia is for us to start paying for things again. This will create more opportunities for people to run sustainable small business and spread wealth out more instead of concentrating it in a few advertising conglomerates.

> Weather Underground

Weather data is already gathered by state authorities in most developed countries. It would be nice if taxpayers could have free and convenient access to the data they paid for. Giving money to a for-profit corporation’s weather app only rewards rentseeking.

Are you suggesting there's no extra effort involved in taking a raw data feed and presenting it in an actually usable app for user?

I can get free weather details with the built-in iOS app, but I still bought Dark Sky because it's a better interface. I have no qualms with this purchase.

https://www.weather.gov/ is free (paid for via tax dollars) and has a lot of useful information. The map of the US with all the alerts and warnings on it is rather useful.

In Canada, the federal government has released their own weather app (WeatherCAN), including alerts for significant weather in your area. It's basically replaced the commercial weather apps on my phones.

I would pay for DarkSky if it was available here though; I quite appreciate their approach to location privacy: https://blog.darksky.net/location-privacy/

I wonder if disabling ads disabled tracking?

Once you’re out of that dark place, figure out how to build something to make your daughter’s life better.

The best we can do is defend against the Dark Arts.

Amen to this: once you get your feelings in a better place, be part of the solution.

'I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing.'

AllAdvantage? I got a few quid from them back in the day. Strange times...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

Wow that's a thing I had forgotten about. I had an original iMac at the time and built a mouse mover and random site loader to trick the system. I think I made about $25 total because they shutdown shortly after that.

I feel exactly the same way. I now try to pay whenever I can to avoid ads. YouTube Premium, Slate Plus, etc. I also make sure I contribute to the Patreons of the content I enjoy, but often this results in the creator being greedy and running ads when they make more than enough from Patreon. When that happens, I usually stop my donations and just suffer the ads.

Sort of a tangent, I was visiting a friend with a young daughter. After seeing how she acts when watching a movie, and how she reacted when it was time to stop, I wouldn't let my (hypothetical) children be exposed to video, or really the Internet at all, until they were at least teenagers.

I know, I would have to go live with the Amish or something, but daaaaamn... TV and Saturday morning cartoons were bad enough ~30-40 years ago. We're warping kids' minds.

How did she act when watching a movie, that's different from adults when we watch movies?

I'd like a plan where I pay any amount of money I want a month and it donates to websites I visit proportionally to the time I spend on them. I do something similar with Patreon, donating $1/mo to several creators I support. The point is that while it's not much, it's great as a principle, and would work very well at scale.

The Brave browser has something similar. I found it a bit subpar, but it's a good start.

This was/is the idea behind Flattr, I think.

You have 10 € in your account at the beginning of the month which were automatically invoiced from your debit card. You now visit sites or articles or whatever and they have the Flattr button integrated. You like something? You click the Flattr button!

In the end your balance will be split evenly among all Flattr buttons you clicked that month. If you visit NYT regularly and click their buttons often, they will get more money from you than others.

I think you could also set that a single click was worth x cent and they invoiced you the total amount at the end of the month, but I'm not sure about that.

All in all Flattr was/is a great idea, it just somehow did not take off.

How do avoid the incentive of sites who pad their content in ways to make you spend longer on the site? Ideally the market would take care of this, where people would be more likely to visit articles which were more concise because they were more useful, but longer content also is generally a positive metric for search results and I feel like we often fall into this local sub-optimum.

It is extremely likely that malicious advertisers would still exist today even if you had paid for content 20 years ago.

> PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. /

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party."

Can you tell us more about the video? Why it was important for you?

If you have kids, especially, get a browser add-on that disables recommendations and comments. eg. Youtube Unhooked, Distraction Free Youtube, etc.

I think thats a bit naive. Sites will track you even when you pay for it. Do you think anyone would ever give up such a lucrative technology?

Probably best to avoid Cormac McCarthy then. (Don't be fooled by the titles either, like 'All the Pretty Horses'.)

You can find non-tracking & non-recommending Youtube apps like NewPipe on F-Droid.

Do you pay for Youtube (Red)?

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