Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

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The second Netflix introduces ads I would drop my subscription and never go back.

If Netflix at the same time increased the cost of a "non adverstiment" product that is just adding insult to injury.

I have structured my media consumption such that I rarely see any ads, and never any tv-ads.

If find them painful to watch in a real sense of the words.

That means I have dropped a lot of services/products/venues/channels but I have never missed them and certainly not to a degree that would entice me to return.

When I visit someone who has the telly on and it runs in the background I have to grind my teeth and try to find some solution to turning it off.

A dentist I no longer see did an "upgrade" of the office and got TVs mounted in the ceiling and headphones. As the doctor was drilling away having fun, I was supposed to relax, watch tv and have fun.

The drilling was less painful and annoying than having to watch ads every 5 minutes. Closing my eyes was a good option but still the headphones.

My new dentist has logic and math puzzles that he or someone he knows has hand drawn artistically on a big sheet of cardboard that he then attatchs to the ceiling.

This is so much better in every way.

It is also a lot cheaper and better for nature.

I have asked him about tvs and thankfully he has no intention of buying any. He changes them out once a month I think

I just want to say, I am so happy you and others here are voicing this opinion on ads. I agree whole heartedly and avoid them like the plague — because they are a plague. A social disease infecting nearly every facet of modern reality, and rotting away at it.

In my own spaces, nothing with a logo is allowed to be displayed. This makes for a significantly better feeling space. In the past, people have walked in and made comments like “it feels so good in here!” — I attribute it in large part to eliminating the nonstop psychic bombardment of advertising.

When buying new products, I go to significant lengths making sure the item has an ad that can be managed. If I cannot find a product with a logo that’s easily removable, I do not purchase for the most part.

If a streaming service shows an ad to me, it goes off or I leave the area. It is simple.

Other people do not have the right to intrude in my cognition against my will, ESPECIALLY these gluttonous people running megacorporations. They are reducing consciousness for a quick buck against our will. Put another way, they are injecting their ego and greed into anyone possible against their will. I find it to be a type of psychic assault analogous to certain depraved physical assaults relating to self-propagation.

My intuition says ads make us dumber, more compliant, poorer, worse thinkers, more impulse driven, and more subject to external authority; among other pacifying and stupefying impacts. It is a disease worth fighting against.

I haven't used TV for any kind of broadcast, or literally anything that would in any way contain ads for past cca 15 years. TV I have has no wifi connection, never had one, never will have.

I've become physically allergic to ads, anywhere. The way they are done reminds me of those drawings showing some nasty fugly stuff being squished into consumer's brain.

This causes minor issues sometimes when we visit some friends and they have a TV blasting all the time, with their kids being fairly addicted to general media consumption. Anytime this happens and I see how they are glued to phones or consoles is a stark warning about choosing different path for my small kiddoz. Such a path you can lead them on by example.

The amount of time we have thanx to this to spend on more important matters in life is non-trivial.

Man, I try to explain the diseased nature of the modern advertising and people look at me like I'm crazy.

But look at TV/radio broadcasts. Look at the streets you walk on. The websites you browse. It's literally everywhere, and its only purpose is to catch your eye to make you feel like you need to buy stuff. And they will stop at nothing to achieve that, including making you feel inadequate or abusing your weaknesses.

And in the last 15 years, we've let these unscrupulous people gather all sorts of data on who we are and what we do, which they use to target us with the ads that manipulate us the best.

That is what sounds crazy to me.

Preaching to the choir, I know. It amazes me that most people don't seem to care all that much. I wonder if we're just overly sensitive to interruptions and manipulation.

Right with you on that. I hate the loss of control when made to watch ads.

I've already dropped 1 streaming service (NowTV) for forcing me to watch trailers before the shows I actually pay to watch.

I'm considering dropping Prime for the same reason. With Prime you can at least skip trailers but why can't I just opt out of the bloody things the first place?

Auto-playing anything is tedious annoying. Auto-playing, _unskippable_ anything is an abomination in my personal opinion and not something I will pay for.

The article is proposing offering a two tiers, one with ads and one without, which is what most of Netflix's competitors do.

That would allow you and others who feel similarly to continue watching ad-free.

Imagine if we had a company that managed to produce its products with minimal waste and had an efficient recycling program. It would be a little bit more expensive to run because it was paying for the externalities, but the profit margins were high enough that a business could still be had without destroying itself.

Now, a bunch of competitors show up and they just don't care about the environment. They dump all the waste on their neighbors. Their products cost a less than the main company, but they give you a "green option" where you can pay a bit more to offset (some) of the externalities.

What you are proposing is that the company goes down in their principles to compete with their toxic competitors. For what?

That is a pretty terrible analogy. For starters, there are no externalities in people choosing to subscribe to an ad-supported version.

Ads themselves are the toxic waste.

You work with ads at Google (aka, the biggest mind polluter there is) so I understand why you might think otherwise.

Ok, let's take a step back and look at your analogy. Pollution is a classic problem of externalities: one party is doing something that has costs, but those costs fall on people who are uninvolved. You have a company that is producing lots of pollution while creating products (A), the people who buy those products (B), and the people who are harmed by pollution (C). The reason that A doesn't take appropriate steps to avoid creating pollution is that neither A nor B suffer most of the costs of the pollution; those fall on C.

Netflix adding an ad-funded option does not fit that model because, as I said above, there are no externalities. It is a transaction entirely between Netflix and its viewers, with no uninvolved third parties who receive "toxic waste". Each potential subscriber can decide whether they prefer to pay larger amount for the current experience, or a smaller amount and also have to view ads.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

> I said above, there are no externalities.

A point that you are missing is one that is often overlooked and deserves a proper essay, but to keep it short: the quality of the products is affected by the business model.

I contend that ads themselves are the waste, but it is not just those directly watching the ads that suffer from it. When a service becomes funded by ads, the best metric for quality (customers willing to pay for the product) gets separated from the best metric for its sustainability (revenue and profitability).

This is why a large part of why journalism is horrible today: any news editor has to prioritize what gives them eyeballs over "quality reporting", so no matter how many actual subscribers a newspaper still has, it is still going to be over-polarized, play to outrage culture and more "infotainment" than actual journalism.

More examples?

- Spotify and the Joe Rogan drama. Whether you agree/disagree and support/disapprove of whatever he is talking about on his show, would you agree that this whole thing would be a nothingburger if his audience were limited to the people willing to pay money to hear him?

- The whole of the sports industry. Remove "broadcast rights" and all the advertising that comes with it, and there would not be NBA kowtowing to China, or FIFA pushing a World Cup built in Qatar on the back of slave labor, or F-1 in bed with the Saudis, etc, etc.

Streaming services are already bad in the sense that they rather cater to quantity over quality, but at least the fact that people have to pay something is some kind of filter on "minimum quality". With an ad-funded model this filter is completely removed and everything starts getting produced for the lowest common denominator.

As you should be well aware, the transactions in volving advertising are not between the media channel and its audience, but between the media channel and its advertisers. The audience is the good sold.

I'm curious as to just what research you've done into the corrosive effects of advertising on media, the public, and audiences yourself. You might begin with a mid-1990s Stanford research project on the subject:

[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

The same might be said of any media channel.

There's a delightful 1909 pubication I've recommended numerous times here and elsewhere, Commercialization and Journalism, by Hamilton Holt, a magazine publisher himself. It's short, information-dense, highly-readable, and describes the state of the media industry as the implications of a business model based on mass advertising was first becoming apparent.

It is introduced with quote from John Swinton (the "anonymous New York City journalist" of Holt's text):

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...

That from the 19th century.

I've compiled a light reading list of other sources which you might find compelling. It in addition to Bagdikian cited by the Stanford researchers, notable names such as Bernays, Chomsky, and McLuhan, and your own former colleague Tim Wu, to whom you might also add Tristan Harris. I'd also draw your attention specifically to Jerry Mander, who though the medium he criticised was television has many concerns that apply also to the Internet and mobile devices.

If you care to see.

> That would allow ̶𝗒̶𝗈̶𝗎̶ ̶𝖺̶𝗇̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗈̶𝗍̶𝗁̶𝖾̶𝗋̶𝗌̶ ̶𝗐̶𝗁̶𝗈̶ ̶𝖿̶𝖾̶𝖾̶𝗅̶ ̶𝗌̶𝗂̶𝗆̶𝗂̶𝗅̶𝖺̶𝗋̶𝗅̶𝗒̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗈̶ ̶𝖼̶𝗈̶𝗇̶𝗍̶𝗂̶𝗇̶𝗎̶𝖾̶ ̶𝗐̶𝖺̶𝗍̶𝖼̶𝗁̶𝗂̶𝗇̶𝗀̶ ̶𝖺̶𝖽̶-̶𝖿̶𝗋̶𝖾̶𝖾̶.̶ ̶

Netflix to make more money out of nothing.

When Foxtel or Optus (cant remember probably both) entered Australian cable TV market they promised no adds, and there were zero adds, a few years later they introduced adds and increased the price in the same letter to subscriber. most people kept it.

I am so tired of these comments about Netflix:

“I am going to cancel if Netflix splits disc from streaming.”

“I am going to cancel if Netflix raises prices.”

“I am going to cancel if Netflix makes it difficult to share passwords.”

“I am going to cancel if Netflix cancels my shows.”

“I am going to cancel if Netflix introduces ads.”

Netflix did more to free the market from the stranglehold the networks had for decades. If you want to go back to paying $150 per months for cable, be my guest. People seriously have issues with Netflix raising prices 25-30% in the past DECADE while their catalog has increased significantly?

I will absolutely cancel Netflix if they introduce ads. I will cancel Netflix if they cancel shows I want to watch. I don't owe them anything in addition to the money I have already paid them for their service. Their business model and disruption of cable doesn't entitle them to my future money.

You fail to recognize one important factor. Those that did cancel dont show up to these comment threads anymore.

Me being one of them for I think I'm about to hit the 2 year mark soon on being sans-Netflix.

Any show I like and publicly does well, cancelled on season 3. Shows that have been popping up are utter trash. I was thinking of doing a month when Cowboy Bebop dropped... yea... I'm glad i didnt. I'm waiting for Witcher season 3 to drop, then I'll get it for a month and cancel it.

Their business practices are staying from, "deliver awesome content in an awesome way" to "squeeze blood from a rock".

Back in the day, Marco Polo was their shit tier show and it was awesome. The netflix exclusives that were coming out 2 years ago were trash and I could see the writing on the wall that it wasn't going to get better. What I hear about lately, it's all a fucking joke. They're hitting the theres a quality in quantity mindset and the numbers are showing that it's not working.

Maybe if they placed more focus on good movies and shows instead of the business models LITERALLY EVERYONE RAN AWAY FROM TO GET NETFLIX IN THE FIRST PLACE... they might be complaining that there aren't enough good writers and filmmakers out there because they already bought up everyone. That's a better and much more respectable problem to have instead of being a silicon valley bro who worries about "scale" during every conversation.

Yep, I tapped out on netflix too. Never said anything about it to anyone that didn't live with me. Pretty quiet and mundane decision, more like a realization it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I think we will drop it soon too. We pay for four or so streaming services and the number of times I fire up Netflix and fail to find anything I want to watch is immeasurable. I figure the best bet with these services is to periodically drop one or two for a few months until they add new contact, then bring it back to replace another one. Pointless paying for them all but only watching a select few things.

The alternative is actually torrenting.

If there was an ad free service, where you can easily watch ANY tv show or movie when you want it, I'd pay $50+/month for it.

No it’s not. Streaming tech is leaps and bounds better than pirating. Same goes for music services.

Huh? In what important way? I don't care it's technically impressive I'm being served a DRM-protected datastream through a global CDN network. I can download any show in 5 minutes and have it as a file, wholly on my own disk.

Is it though? If paid streaming services started showing ads by default, the experience would definitely be worse for customers.

You do realize they’re not even considering this options right? This is just some nobody contemplating. And even if they did, it will just be another price tier same as competition.

It’s the discussion topic, though.

Except that now there is a lot of competition in the Netflix space.

Part of the reason cable is/was so expensive is that you wanted more than one channel so you could see shows on other channels.

Netflix is now just s channel, HBO, Amazon, AppleTV (whatever they call it),Disney. Want to watch Boba Fett but still follow a show on Netflix, now you are paying for two channels. (and so on).

Of course you can rotate, Netflix one month, Disney the next, but by spacing out release to once a week, they can hook people into subscibting to several streaming services.

I have a problem because their catalog has decreased significantly. Out are good old shows with many seasons and twenty shows per season. In are a few formularic Netflix originals with two seasons and 8 to 10 episodes a season.

Not all is bad, of course, but I quickly run out of good content and if I see something I would like to watch later, it is often gone by then.

Then I can search for it, only for Netflix to show me a bunch of irrelevant stuff not even close to what I was looking for.

While their catalog has increased significantly in the last decade, most of it is shows they've produced or bought. The quality of these shows is hit or miss. I didn't subscribe to Netflix for serial productions. I subscribed for movies. And over the last decade their catalog has decreased significantly.

Very soon Streaming services might look expensive than cable, if you want to buy 4 or more services out of discovery+, disney+, netflix, showtime, hbo, peacock, cbs hulu, paramount, fox, appletv+, youtube red etc..

> Netflix did more to free the market from the stranglehold the networks had for decades

but we don't have any obligation to keep supporting them it they f*ck up

Piracy is still free.

Glad to see a number of others that feel the same as I do. I would love for this sentiment to grow.

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