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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

If you’re reading their content why wouldn’t you click their affiliate links?

You’re costing them server hours and purposefully not giving them revenue despite it costing you nothing.

>If you’re reading their content why wouldn’t you click their affiliate links?

Because they blackmail companies into affiliate revenue with the threat of "unrecommending" their products. See: https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

That accusation is actually not supported by the facts, as detailed elsewhere in this thread.

There is no agreement that I have to click their crap. And the server time is their problem not mine. I never said I'd click anything the freely published content they made specifically available to me

Affiliate links are a cancer along with the rest of the advertising-surveillance industry, and it's best to avoid contributing however you can. I do all my product research with a different nym (separate browser VM and IP address) from what I actually login and checkout with.

In general the web was at its best decades ago, when people published because they knew things and were internally compelled to share. Despite the drop in quality and overwhelming prevalence of shameless blogspam (from which Wirecutter is one or two steps up), I prefer to continue acting as if that information sharing is still the overriding motivation.

"In general the web was at its best decades ago, when people published because they knew things and were internally compelled to share."

What does this mean, "internally compelled"?

If someone is providing systematic reviews of products, it takes time and resources to do so. Why would they do this for free?

I mean when someone's motivation comes from what they themselves are interested in and their wanting to pass along their knowledge to help others, as opposed to say the external incentive of being financially compensated. I know this seems completely foreign in this age of played out incentives, but such publishing used to be quite common before independent sites were drowned out by webspam. You'd do a search, dig through a few pages of results, and hit upon an information-dense (likely plain text) site of someone thoroughly geeking out about your topic.

RIP JohnnyGuru dot com :-(

I think you're waxing nostalgically about a time that wasn't nearly as good as you think it was. There's orders of magnitudes of more useful information on the internet today than there was decades ago. Yes, it's more often on platforms and not usually personal websites anymore, but there are still plenty of creators doing it out of passion, even if sometimes - but definitely not always - they also have financial incentive as well.

Well I'm definitely remembering many occasions of finding sites that had in-depth technical analysis. And being unable to find such discussion today. There likely is a higher quality of information today (just due to sheer participation), but the stuff that's easy to find by searching is generally quite shallow. If you're lucky you'll get two or three forum threads that mostly address your question.

I think there's truth to the nostalgia-goggles view here.

I think the early internet:

- was a more distinctly bounded subset of individuals - now it's closer to a random sampling of humans

- had less "background monetary radiation" so there was far less incentive to make low value content

- content spread mostly by human -> human interaction so the bar for something being shared and consequently your likelyhood of seeing it was set higher

It feels like the signal to noise ratio was significantly better as a combination of those things. This sort of product-shilling was less profitable. Also in general the profitability vector being "people click the buy link" vs "people's continued trust in my expertise" influences the sort of content that's created.

Are you saying I should be giving them revenue for not being terribly open about the fact that they only review products which can earn them a commission, and that furthermore, they deserve revenue from me for recommending products I spent about $500 or more in total for, only for them all to have significant flaws?

You are consuming the product. They have an asking price for the product (which includes affiliate links and ads).

If you don't like the asking price, that is 100% fine. Don't consume the product.

You seem to be wanting to decide what is a fair price for product that they produced and set a price for.

Yikes. The overwhelming sense of entitlement is very strong here.

In both directions. I've never seen clicking on affiliate links as price to be paid for a service. That's also sure as hell not what the ToS say.

Using affiliate links to pay for content creation/hosting is reasonable. Bypassing affiliate links is also reasonable. If you want to be owed something, put it in the ToS.

I don't know what you are referring to but plenty of times they link directly to a retailers' website where they don't earn commissions.

It's also a reasonable way for them to make money that isn't:

1. Invasive tracking 2. Nasty ads 3. Direct subscriptions

Take your entitlement elsewhere.

> Take your entitlement elsewhere.

What are your thoughts regarding ad blocking? Specifically, do you also find people who use adblockers (I assume you don't use one of course) entitled?

Absolutely (I am one of them though I'm a member of or otherwise monetarily support publications I frequent).

The thing I hate is people who try to come up transparently disingenuous reasons for why they are entitled to not support organizations they extract value out of ("ehh I don't like your CSS so I'm going to not give you any money").

"the fact that they only review products which can earn them a commission"

So you're saying https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/about/ is a lie?

> Are you saying I should be giving them revenue for not being terribly open about the fact that they only review products which can earn them a commission

It's right on the top of their front page:

"Wirecutter is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more."

You missed the key word "only" in my comment. Yes, they certainly make it clear they earn affiliate commission, which is fine. But what they do not make clear is the fact that they will totally ignore products that do not allow them to earn a commission, or at best, they will put them very far down on the list for some strange reason that doesn't really align with their explanation or lack thereof. This is very misleading.

Do you have hard evidence for the "only" portion? Based on their response to NextDesk, they do review items for which they don't get a commission:

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/our-response-to-nextdesk/

That's simply not true. I've bought products from Wirecutter recommendations that simply link a clean merchant url - no affiliate link.

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