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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is people are willing to pay for certain products with their attention, via ads, but not with money.

1. People who are adblocking are saying that they are not willing to pay with attention. You can only compare their relative willingness to pay with attention vs money when you provide both options fairly.

2. I don't take it as given that businesses have the right to make money however they want. There are human right principles and I think an important fundamental right missing from the UN Declaration is the right to not be subjected to subtle influence techniques that compromise your beliefs (even if those belief are about which soap you should buy). Any business strategy that goes against this principle should be illegal and if certain industries and businesses die as a result, so be it. I would take no economic growth over compromised human rights any day.

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> 1. People who are adblocking are saying that they are not willing to pay with attention.

No.

As a person who's adblocking, that is not what I'm saying. I'm perfectly willing to pay with attention; I'm not willing to pay with my data, I'm not willing to be tracked across sites, and I'm not willing to let my browser execute whatever garbage the ad network is sending down the pipe at me.

Ad blocking is like eating apples. Some apple eaters are vegans, some are vegetarians, and some are just regular omnivores. A diverse population with many reasons for doing what they're doing.

Myself, I'd prefer to pay with my data if the terms were clear. I have an issue with manipulation, and I'll be blocking all ads I can until the ones that are left are non-attention-grabbing, non-interactive, not manipulative, related to the site I'm in, moderated, and preferably pull, not push.

Different folks, different strokes. I'm also adblocking and I started way before it became a privacy thing, because I don't. Want. Ads. In my content.

Do you pay for your content then?

I listen to music on Spotify, I watch shows and movies on Netflix and Amazon Video. I buy my video games on GOG and Steam. I buy my books and read them on my Kindle.

What does that leave? I don't pay for YouTube, for example. Not that I care that much, because the stuff I watch on YouTube is mostly not the stuff I would miss. The stuff I would miss would probably be available even if YouTube didn't exist (e.g. Zero Punctuation).

Since we're talking about paying, here's another question: do I resort to piracy? Yes, because there are often good reasons to do so.

Movies and shows? Netflix and Amazon mostly don't have subtitles in Spanish, so when I wanna watch something with my wife, sometimes the only way is to download it.

Music? I'd love to be able to come to some agreement with Spotify that lets me save a number of songs a month or a year and let them be mine, so they'll never disappear from my playlist just because Spotify pulled them.

Books? Usually the first book I read from an author I haven't read before is a book I'll pirate. If it's good, I'll buy it and buy that author's subsequent books. We used to use libraries for that kind of stuff.

As you can see, most of those problems aren't solvable by ads.

Here's a question for you, though: do you think Wikipedia would be better off with ads?

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The alternative to advertising is paid subscription content. I don’t see how you’re going to achieve greater privacy by giving someone your credit card number.

Civilized Internet economies have moved way past people giving every service or merchant their credit card numbers. There is a number of alternative payment schemes which share less information with the money recipient, and doesn't let them pull money off one's account.

>There is a number of alternative payment schemes

Can you please explicitly list those alternative payment methods you had in mind?

When I last researched this, alternatives like micropayments, Flattr, cryptocurrency, digital wallet donations, etc are not viable revenue amounts in comparison to credit-card subscriptions or sponsored ads.

As for the mobile phone payments that are more popular than credit-cards in China and Africa, those are not privacy-preserving from what I can tell.

Well, in my country there's a number of payment intermediaries like Przelewy24, PayU and a bunch of others, which proxy a payment without themselves receiving your card number either. The way it's constructed, you get redirected to your own bank's webpage, where you log in just to confirm a pre-filled transaction from your account to the intermediary service.

Then there's also Blik, which is the same except I don't even have to log in on the web page; I read a random six-digit code off my bank's app, enter it on the payment intermediary site, confirm again on the phone, and money moves.

Why? First of all, why must there be a dichotomy here? Second, why must I give each site my credit card number directly? Why can't we do that differently?

The conventional wisdom is that ads are more convenient. I hope that, sooner or later, this will stop being true and we'll have a variety of better ways of supporting content.

> the right to not be subjected to subtle influence techniques that compromise your beliefs

i strongly disagree. everyone's beliefs need to be challenged. that is the only way we have progressed as a society throughout the ages.

Challenging someone's beliefs involves being explicit, so that one's aware their beliefs are being challenged. It's the exact opposite of manipulation, and thus advertising.

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