I'd like to remind everyone that we enjoy this conversation on a FREE forum, which is basically one big AD for a startup incubator company.
Which I personally have no gripes with.
Which I personally have no gripes with.
In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence.
I'm not sure HN would benefit from requiring a paid subscription. I think that aversion to the aforementioned criticism would be avoided even more, or otherwise replaced with sheer entitlement.
That was back in the early 2000s where if people wanted to protest against a forum's new policy, or a decline in quality, they'd just boot up a fresh instance of phpBB and essentially 'fork' the community. I don't know anyone back then who hadn't had experience setting up and modding a phpBB board, or dealing with vBulletin and Invision Power Board. I kind of miss that because now we just have various SaaS that run managed communities through apps...
There are likely plenty out there, but you're probably looking at niche forums that require some time and investment to become a part of. HN is one of those. Reddit will only offer you so much.
While some of these thoughts are definitely unwelcome, as they should be (we do need boundaries), I'm quite happy to engage with the mixed and low quality non-tech content either to educate myself to other points of view, or to attempt to counter them in the case of misunderstanding. And that's what a good debate is all about.
For me, that's a great experience because I enjoy being given the opportunity to be sensibly proven wrong.
Just think how useful google could be if you could filter out commercial results, or import a domain blocklist, or control the ranking algorithm.
Think how usable social media would be if it weren't a way to turn money into "engagement".
Think how much better news sites would be if journalists weren't dependent on wealthy patrons who have the power to withdraw their funding when they perceive bad or unfair coverage.
The illusion of a service being "free", without giving the user any power to actually dictate what makes a service high or low quality, is ultimately just lowering the bar on what the role of technology should be—it's not just a machine for a small portion of society to have "passive income".
Think how useless social media would be if it primarily connected together wealthy individuals that can pay the upkeep needed to operate a sophisticated global network while those who most need a voice cannot.
Think of how much worse society would be if news required an unpopularly high ad-free fee which meant that the best news organizations catered first and foremost to wealthy and already-educated patrons.
The illusion of a service being "ad-free", without serving the broad but lower class foundation of society, would ultimately just destroy the impact and democratizing power of technology. It's not just a machine for a small portion of wealthy, educated Hacker News elites to pay and keep for themselves.
Advertising influence is surely not all positive, but there is no silver bullet here, and I would consider the wet dream of those who want to get rid of advertising without a practical substitute to be a massive regression. I consider the alignment of profits with breadth of access to be one of the biggest engines of progress in the modern age. A poor child in Detroit and a simple mother in a third world country use the same web browser and internet as the most powerful political leaders and heads of industry. That's the world I want to live in.