Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

This is not a good thing.

Ad-blockers on the internet are justified because of invasive tracking. Radio and podcasts have no such thing, and ads are are central to their sustainability.

If you want to push the world to improve, you can't just rage blindly, you have to identify and move towards a solution that's sustainable for everyone. In the case of ad-supported businesses and services, this means non-tracking, non-intrusive advertisement (combined with subscription models, but that doesn't work for everything).

If you want to push back against tracking in ads, you have to support non-tracking ads. Otherwise there's no incentive for anything to change.

View on HN

> If you want to push back against tracking in ads, you have to support non-tracking ads.

Why? I don't want any ads whatsoever.

Maybe it's harsh but if they can't survive without ads then let them go? Many good podcasts already charge money.

Well for one thing, it would be literally impossible to establish a subscription model for radio stations. For another thing, online news sources have been trying to make subscriptions work for years and nobody's figured out how to do it yet.

But going beyond that, who are you to declare that entire mediums' worth of content is invalid simply because of the lack of available mechanisms for collecting the revenue they need to sustain themselves? What a gross oversimplification.

If you want behavior to change, you have to provide a valid alternative. You can only say "I won't put up with X" if there's a viable Y to replace it with. Otherwise it's just "I won't put up with you". In which case, when it comes to businesses, the other party will either get even more aggressive with their tactics, or just die altogether.

>> Well for one thing, it would be literally impossible to establish a subscription model for radio stations.

I get what you’re saying, but Sirius XM would like a word with you.

Despite the name, it's really not the same thing at all.

>just die altogether

Sounds good. I preferred when websites existed as a result of a person's individual passion on a particular topic, not the network of fake news clickbait vying for attention that we have now.

So you'd like online journalism to just die off because they can't figure out how to get money from the people who benefit from their work?

There's a few community radio stations in my home city. They play good music, support local musicians and local venues, and are largely funded by voluntary memberships. This membership gets you a bumper sticker and a good feeling.

Contrast this to the commercial radio stations which allocate a huge proportion of their airtime to annoying, dishonest, manipulative ads employing all sorts of shady tactics (like those discussed elsewhere in this comments thread) to try to part me with my money.

Sure, those sound great, but that's not a subscription, that's a donation. And sustaining something via donations requires a huge confluence of people caring about something all at the same time with single-minded intentionality. It's fantastic when it works out, but it's far from being something you can just prescribe as a solution. People are finnicky, and without a unifying ethos this model simply isn't realistic in the general case.

This is the biggest strength of government-organized public spending, by the way. Some people say private organizations - when you include nonprofits - can accomplish anything a government can. And that's true in theory, but in practice certain things don't work at all unless everyone's on the exact same page. And turns out it's really hard getting everyone on the exact same page. So democracy says "we're going to vote on what that exact same page is, but then we're all going to act as a single unit no matter how we individually feel about the decision". Some things can only work that way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com