You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.
> Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.
I'd pay a monthly fee for unmolested search results. I pay for Youtube Premium. I only watch ad-free content that I pay for.
I don't want the content for free - the free stuff is usually worse in quality anyway. I just want to be left alone by advertisers. I don't need what they are selling and the reduce my ability to think. The sheer amount of noise they add to the world makes them a problem.
Anyone using an adblocker is expecting free content.
I would say no, and I think websites are not different from media I listed above. If they make or don't make enough money it's not my business. I am free to consume their freely distributed products as I like.
Advertisements directly lower the quality of any content I'm consuming and I am expecting high quality content.
If someone wants to turn a profit on their site, that's fine. Do I need to accept whatever they want to serve me when I visit their page? No. Do I need to buy a product from their store if it's not something I'm interested in, even though the payment may go to helping their hosting costs? No.
I feel like there are some IRC channels that owe me some dividends.
Also, a lot of that content still exists but it is hidden behind the SEO garbage.
If I were to ever buy an Android phone (I wouldn’t because Google). It would be a Google device.
I also pay more for an AppleTV than a Roku because half of the Roku screen and the hard coded buttons on the remote are ads.
It's not always possible to buy out of advertising. One of my fave sites anandtech.com has (I guess relatively reasonable) ads, and I can't subscribe or whatever to get rid of them.
I'm also generally OK with Adwords v1.0 ads, which had virtually no chance of autoplaying a super loud video, running malware on my machine, breaking the layout of a page as I'm trying to click on something, or masquerading as genuine content.
Ad blockers respond to the fact that users have very little ability to control their ad experiences, even in ways we probably think are appropriate like buying out of them. What you're implying here (ads vs. free content) is a false dichotomy.
ads vs. free content is indeed a very false dichotomy.
Oh the irony! Likewise, the agreement between the content company and the ad company has nothing to do with my consumption of the content. The content company agrees to show ads for the ad company. The ad company agrees to make ads for the content company to show and pay them to show the ads. I make no agreement with either. I download the content and choose not to download the ad. It’s my bandwidth.
The privacy invasion that accompanies web ads leads me to treat them as malware and prevent their execution on my devices. I don't care about non-personalized ads (e.g. the 1P-hosted display ads on Ravelry).
Going without is better than ad funded. The goal of me running ad blockers is not just to make my life nicer but to make ad funded shit (i.e. most of the current internet) unviable.
Paywall away! If it’s good enough for the money, I’ll always pay for it.
The big thing we need is some kind of action against Google: they currently are the best positioned to penalize operators of sites slowed by ads but the search team isn't going to cut into their ad business and Chrome is going to continue slow-walking attempts to make browsers restrict ad networks. It'd also be nice if there was liability for malware delivered by ads — something like they have to pay a fine up front and try to recover it from their advertiser, forcing them to actually vet people first.
What I'd like would be publishers self-hosting ads — forcing them to take more responsibility for the security risks — and more effort into alternative payment mechanisms. I liked the idea of Google Contributor but one big challenge for that is that even a less half-hearted version probably wouldn't generate enough money to be viable because most people consider ads a reasonable cost for free content.
People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There were books, films, subscription TV services, paid for audio. There were also steady streams of novel manuscripts, demo tapes and screenplays that went straight into the bin because they were rubbish. Now the rubbish hangs around on a webpage surrounded by trackers, luring people in with clickbait titles and lies, and multiplying beyond the ability of even google to sort out.
Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).
I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.
Paying people for good content doesn't fix the problem. The internet is still cluttered with awful content drowning out the useful stuff. Not because people are trying hard and learning or just plain love their awful guitar playing even if nobody is watching, but because they're getting paid by surveillance. What we need is the absence of that incentive.
This is one of those cases where the free market would actually fix the problem if there was some sensible regulation applied. Sadly it'll never be quick enough to catch up with the technology.
I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.
The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.
When a website wants to make viewing their ads mandatory for viewing their content, that is their prerogative. Most don't, and I'm not obligated to volunteer my CPU for their ads.
I will take the content as long as they don't bother blocking me, and will try to get more people to do the same. Their business model does not work if they start blocking everybody, it also doesn't work if too many people take the content without the ads. That means I'm helping them fail, what is absolutely good. The sooner they all go away, the better.
There's a world of a difference between a Linus Tech Tips style sponsored segment and some jarring ad that constantly interrupts your YouTube video to scream at you about KFC.
Same for text content where they'll insert outright scams that use disgusting or offensive images to farm clicks throughout the article.
If advertising wasn't so obnoxious, people wouldn't go to such lengths to block it.
1. People wanted content without paying for it.
2. Creators wanted/needed financial support to make and host their work.
Advertising filled the void between those two things. You can think of it as sort of a natural, emergent property. No one wanted advertising, but the way the individual actors behaved—web users preferring sites that didn't charge them, creators that didn't advertise going out of business—led to the rise of advertising.
I think that is part of why some people don't think of advertising as morally bad. No one deliberately nefariously foisted it onto the world, it just arose from the behavior of individuals. That behavior created an environment, and the environment evolved the dominance of ads.
You can use that exact same argument justify the use of ad-blockers now.
People using ad blockers are not actively trying to harm creators. They are just using the web and tools available in the way that makes the most sense for them. This is exactly the same as when they chose to prefer non-paid ad-supported content before. The system gave them options, and they chose the ones that they prefer.
Creators will in turn make the choices that make the most sense for them. If ad blockers mean that they no longer make money from ads, they'll find other ways to be sustainably creative. Markets aren't magic solutions to all problems, but in this case I think the market is working pretty damn efficiently.
People are using ad blockers because ads are bad for them. If consumers improving the quality of their own life is a problem for the system, the system should change. And in order to change, it needs systemic incentives to do so. Ad blockers create that incentive.
An argument against ad blockers is essentially an argument for forcing users to consume something toxic. Imagine if McDonald's stopped selling burgers in isolation, required you to buy combos, and then forced you to drink your entire soda. When people who wanted to cut back on unhealthy sugar complained, they were told that they're the problem because McDonald's makes most of its profit from drinks. If they don't drink the soda then McDonald's won't be as profitable and then they won't be in business. That's basically the argument against ad blockers.
But... a burger joint that forced you to chug soda should be out of business, or should at least have to change its pricing in a way that lets people eat in a healthier manner. Ad blockers enable consumers to "stop drinking the soda" in the attention combo offered by sites.
"Information wants to be free" used to be part of the hacker ethos.
Also, ads can be served in ways that makes blocking much more difficult. It's just harder to do, and harder to track users across sites. (and therefore, probably less lucrative to the site owners).
What happened to serving ads based on site content? How is using poor algorithms that require a lot of tracking and then make bad guesses about your interests any better?