Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)
blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk
blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk
Closing your eyes is just another ad blocking measure, and the idea that that would be unethical ought to be utterly preposterous.
Maybe unrelated, but I always think of this when I pay for a ticket and go to the cinema, so I can watch fifteen minutes of trailers and commercials before the actual movie begins.
But this isn't the fucking model.
The model is: We created compelling content that draws lots of views, and companies will pay us to plaster their name/products on it.
There is literally zero contract with the person being shown the ads at all. They can do as they please.
If companies don't like that... move to a different model - stop showing your stuff for free.
what if that model was a contract to the viewer, wherein the viewer agrees to see all adverts? Currently this contract is assumed, or implied, but not enforced. What if it changes in the future?
For example, youtube could require that you have a webcam, and run a trusted-computing-module DRM code which forces your webcam to be on and recording your face to view their videos?
> youtube could require that you have a webcam
That would be the end of Youtube. But I'm pretty sure someone will write a plugin to work around that piece of dystopian hell.
Nor to your Internet bandwidth which you pay for and which on some providers is a (artificially) limited "resource" they'll charge you extra for if you use "too much" of it (unless they're like NetZero back in the day, delivering you free Internet in trade for forced adverts)… Nor to potentially compromise the security of your network (as has happened in the past due to some "shady" advertising networks delivering malware)… Nor to interfere with paid content (as happens on some streaming services which still show ads despite you paying to view the content).
I propose a mandatory integration with Alexa devices. Whenever the DRM module detects the consumer failing to fulfil the contractually required viewing quota, the Alexa device will be notified to emit loudly the message “Resume viewing!”. Furthermore, if available, it will cause the Hue lights to turn red and flash in order to amplify the gravity and importance of the message.
In addition to the mandatory Alexa integration, I believe it is paramount advertisers be allowed to enforce contractual viewing quotas in order to prevent financial losses. To that end, failure to resume viewing within 30 seconds should result in immediate freezing of bank accounts, immediate blocking of the self driving car from working and immediate locking of the house smart lock - To prevent the consumer from escaping the contractually enforced duties.
One more idea I can add is this. It is unfair for the advertisers to incur loss and costs due to non compliant consumers. In order to rectify these losses, interest in the form of viewing time should be applied to time spent not watching adverts. A standard 12.5% time interest should suffice. For example, a consumer failing to resume watching for 10 minutes should have 1 minute and 15 seconds added to the viewing quota.
There is no contract; it's an open market and they are competing for my attention.
There is no contract assumed, there is no contract implied, thus there is nothing to enforce.
> but not enforced. What if it changes in the future?
You make it sound like they didn't try. All those sites that attempted to "enforce"[1] this fictional contract you are referring to are not longer in existence, because there was no contract so the "enforcement" was merely user-abuse.
[1] Lots of sites did their best to undermine adblockers, going so far as to disable the site if an adblocker was detected. Those sites no longer exist.
lots of sites that stop adblockers still exist - your sampling is probably biased if you don't see it.
> You make it sound like they didn't try.
Recently (or about a yr ago, cannot recall any more) twitch.tv stopped allowing adblockers from blocking their ad feeds in to the stream. It's an expensive method (injecting ad video stream into the livestream data - you cannot directly ignore the ad; at best you can blank it out and wait for the 30 seconds).
Youtube didn't try. Youtube probably considers adblocking a small issue atm (just my guess), and likely a lot of views come from the mobile app, which is much harder to block ads on. Twitch is trying, and is pretty successful. It wouldn't surprise me that the method twitch uses might work elsewhere too.
No, it's not. Except perhaps by ad companies, but one side assuming a contract does not a contract make.
> youtube could require that you have a webcam, and run a trusted-computing-module DRM code which forces your webcam to be on and recording your face to view their videos?
Then I wouldn't watch YouTube anymore -- that's far too much to pay for something like YouTube.
A better analogue for your description is something like the Guardian website, where you don't have to pay for it, but it does require a certain number of people to volunteer to subscribe for it to work.
Another different model is paywalls, which you may be correct in saying will pop up increasingly as use of ad blockers decreases ad revenue sufficiently.
You're talking about something else.
Isn't that a worthy goal? After all, if the "system" stops working, it's not as if the internet will go away, or the worthwhile sites will disappear.
The "system" is a parasitic drain on the users. If it went away, the internet will still be there, as will the users.
I don't get paid for 99.9% of the ads that infest my daily life. I get no say in it at all. There is no off switch. There is no block. There is no avoiding it. The logos are everywhere. The posters. The visual and audible noise. Advertising has infested my childhood memories FFS. I can recite more goddamn jingles from when I was under 10 than I can remember my friends and classmates names. I got no say in it then and none now.
The idea that it is unethical to block when having punches thrown at you as we are is just so incredibly ridiculous it's hard to see it other than facebrick google paid propaganda that you've taken to heart somehow. Bit tobacco sponsor your nation's culture so it's unethical not to smoke a pack a day at least.
But sure google and facebook are super-duper-ethical so doing an endrun around some part of their business plan (a tiny part of what they're selling of you) is so much worse than their endrun around the GPL license by distributing access to the software but not the actual binaries. Legally fine, ethically, well they don't have a problem with it, should we?
Meanwhile those writing, creating, and having their work infested with ads aren't getting rich like Larry, Sergei & Mark, are they? Stick up for those who have made more money screwing the public and the commons than their great grandchildren can possibly ever spend because if they don't get their money it's unethical due to argument they refute with ever fiber of their being and a bajillion bucks in PR.
I tend libertarian adjacent but this stuff makes as communist sympathetic as I'm ever likely to be.
As I say, it doesn't need to be ethical.
On your comment: of course, no one is throwing punches at you. It's just advertising. You don't have to go to the website that has it on.
Advertising is designed to make you feel shit (inadequate) and does it so effectively people kill themselves with anorexia over it to cite but one example.
It's like a prostitute saying their pimp doesn't /really/ hurt them when they get a beating.
Your other option is not to just "not go to _the_ website" because you have no choice other than to unplug and live in a cave. Defending yourself and your family as best you can from the onslaught isn't just ethical it's actually a duty to your family and fellow humans. Do it. Any way you can manage. Every way.
If the content is paid for by adverts, then of course I am not contributing to that payment. Because I am not an advertising company, so by your own logic I didn't pay for the content. What's the problem?
Just because you don’t directly pay for something doesn’t mean you don’t do so indirectly. For example, Facebook makes almost all their revenue from ads, but advertisers won’t pay them if users don’t visit. So by visiting Facebook (if you do), you’re keeping them afloat.
if you have sky TV it has a DVR that lets you record programmes
but if you want to fast forward through the ads in programmes you have recorded you have to pay a monthly fee
https://www.sky.com/help/articles/ad-skipping
I expect the camera that tracks you leaving the room will be in the next generation
If there's an actual literal Hell, then Lucifer surely has an extra cushy corner of it set aside for advertisers, and he'll force the rest of us to march through it with our eyes open wide several times daily between our other tortures…
If you look at ads, you are funding advertisers' mission to create hell on earth.
They're using your own mind against you with psycological techniques you're blind to. Behind every advertisement is a group of real life people working hard to find new ways to control and manipulate YOUR mind and the people you love. They'll lie to your face as long as it "increases brand awareness in our target demographic". Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to block these people?
I block ads myself, but if I didn't it'd be because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
To see the absurdity of this position just replace "view ads" with the following:
I would stop content creators from breaking into my home and taking money from my wallet in the middle of the night, but I don't because it's the only wildly prevalent, fairly minimal hassle way to make micro-payments to a service/content I'm benefiting from.
It is not the responsibility of consumer to accept harmful practices because they're the only practices in broad use.
Fwiw ads have more properties than just being micro payments. Another property is that the price is a monotonic growing function of your revenues, so """every viewer contribute with how much they can"""
p.s. if you like the Century of the Self, watch Hypernormalization as well. Amazing documentaries.
Ah yes the nerd reality distortion down votes. HN really is a shithole.
I don't think ads are inherently evil, but most ads are designed to exploit human psychology instead of just making you aware that a product exists.
If they were that manipulative, they would always work. Every time you saw an ad you would immediately be compelled to buy whatever it was advertising like those mall zombies from Dawn of the Dead.
Ads are manipulative but definitely not "mind control" manipulative. You would probably be more effective convincing people of the dangers of advertising without resorting to hyperbole of that degree.
Lying and manipulation as marketing aren't exactly new, but it's more pervasive, to the point that it seems impossible to succeed without stretching the truth of your capabilities. Everybody else is doing it after all, and there is no penalty. By the time your customers find out you screwed them, they've already paid for your product twice and told their friends it was 5/5 would buy again.
I've never met such a person. I can only imagine them to be barely human. What other bizarre opinions, internal or external, would they have? I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off. But uBlock Origin etc don't just block ads, they also pretend to the site that the ads aren't blocked.
(I used to work in ads)
The fact that you admit to working in an industry that actively tries to take as much agency away from others as it can without (apparently) feeling bad about it is really terrible.
Anecdotally the best advertising I have engaged with and bought the most as a result of is content based, not personalised for me in any way (i.e. podcasts before dynamic ads became a thing)
I'm curious what you bought and how you interact with ads.
For me, I bought a house. I worked closely with a realtor to find my house. That experience was highly personalized.
- Watching a board game video, here are ways to buy the game/expansions/similar games
- Listening to a book review, here are ways to buy the book/other books by the author/art related to the book
- Listening to a tech podcast, here are tech related services that may have been discussed
It sounds like your proposed change would have the search engine use its influence to push sites away from paywall models?
I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it from my burgers. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my burger? Am I forced to consume lettuce?
And before you tell me to look for another burger place, let me remind you there’s no other burger place. All burger places have this business model. All burger places give burgers for free sponsored by Big Lettuce.
So let me ask you again. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my own God damned burger?
Then yes: in this contrived analogy by taking the burger but not eating the lettuce you're freeloading. The more people that do this, the less likely the restaurant is to continue being able to provide free food to anyone that wants it. And I think it would be pretty reasonable for them to have signs like "patrons who do not eat their vegetables will be asked to leave" and "strictly no takeout".
The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
There wasn't really an agreement (implications do not make an agreement) where I will give some amount of my attention for the free thing and, in fact, the free thing was nominally offered to me as free.
The decision to publicly provide the content for "free" with advertisements was made without my input and coordinated without my help. The worst thing my ad blocker does is expose the difficulty with executing that business model.
Would you say that someone who bypasses paywalls is similarly not freeloading?
When it comes to digital content, I think it is rather gray. Artificial scarcity is a term that comes to mind. Looking at Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, etc., I'm not convinced that the ability to bypass payment (e.g. torrenting) is not simply a fundamental problem with the business.
As much as one might consider paywall bypassing to be freeloading, another could consider that the paywalling content provider is just trying to capture rent for data that's otherwise freely available.
That seems like it breaks down when you consider that revenue from the streaming services is funding the creation of new shows?
(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)
Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)
Reading this again, it doesn't seem obvious to me that this is justified so I'll try to explain.
Let's say every copyright owner decides tomorrow that it's not worth trying to enforce copyright and, similarly, everybody who is currently paying for streaming services just starts downloading and seeding torrents for all of the content said services have licensed. In my mind, this only exposes the lack of scarcity, and that the value that these streaming companies provide amounts to hard drive space.
Anyway, that's kinda off-topic copyright stuff. When it comes to, for example, WSJ, I dunno. I would really like it to work with some way of providing creative text without the consumers being required to contribute financially but I would not say that it's the fault of the bypassing consumer when it doesn't work.
It's especially difficult to find a "real-world" example; I can't compare it to stealing from Walmart because WSJ doesn't have to replace what was stolen. If I download a game from TPB instead of Steam, the worst thing that happens is that Steam and the developer of the game lose a sale, whereas if I go down to Best Buy and take one of the packaged discs from their shelf and take it home without paying, Best Buy loses the sale and also needs to replace what wasn't sold (granted, the game publisher still gets paid because they provide the discs and packages).
It's interesting to think about but ultimately, the line I choose to draw is at the scarcity of the product / service: if it's not natural, then it's a fundamentally flawed business, paywall- or ad-driven.
Businesses are not entitled to the success of their business models. If a business model fails due to consumer behavior, the business was in the wrong for expecting different behavior.
> I would be fine with ad blockers that only blocked ads, as long as publishers could chose to refuse service to users running ad blockers or ask them to turn their ad blocker off.
Distracting content (most ads), color schemes with bad contrast, bright images on dark pages, etc. are accessibility hazards (particularly cognitive accessibility hazards). Restricting the use of page-alteration software (e.g. color and font alteration, disabling images, and blocking frames) is therefore a discriminatory practice.
In a sibling subthread:
> The part of your analogy where you say people who want burgers don't have any other choice seems not to fit: you can eat other foods which don't have this requirement, just like there are lots of places on the internet where you can exchange money for ad-free content.
The default behavior on the Web is one in which user-agents set their terms, and websites must agree to them: https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/08/12/user-agents-set-the-term...
The libertarian perspective is a two-way street. Nobody is forcing a person to publish content on the Web. If the "comply with the user's wishes" model of the Web is problematic to a content creator, they don't need to participate in the Web.
POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) note from https://seirdy.one/notes/2022/09/10/in-defense-of-content-bl...
From experience: When your government spies on you and locks folks up without due process, this is good because it keeps the children safe. And a host of other convictions that are so toxic I cannot say them online without feeling dirty. These are the kind of people that say "think of the children" without irony, that view the world in purely adversarial terms and do their best to hate as many things as they can. They live to make everyone around them miserable.
I have seen this repeatedly and only from this kind of person. I am glad I don't have them around me anymore, but sad that other people might.
> I don't think that I could trust them with literally anything.
It being the case that these are the purest of bad faith actors, you can at least trust them to ruin whatever they touch. It's something :)
FWIW, I am against dragnet surveillance, in favor of due process, doubt I've ever said "think of the children" without irony, don't view the world in adversarial terms, enjoy looking for the positive aspects of things other people malign, and don't want anyone to be miserable.
Well that’s why. When you refuse to even listen/consider their argument, no one is going to argue with you. In addition, saying such a thing here gets you downvoted to oblivion. Doesn’t stop people from doing it; Just look at some of the other comments here.
It's not difficult to imagine an argument against ad blockers. Ads pay for the content you consume on the Internet. If you don't like the ads, then your recourse is to leave the site and go elsewhere. You're not entitled to just block the ads and consume the content for free.
I don't personally subscribe to that theory, but I wouldn't describe it as an insane opinion to have.
This is somehow immoral. Cutting paper I have in my possession.
Nah, that's insane, sorry. It speaks to a lack of logical thought processes.
My conclusion, block ads, block ads on your family and friends devices, the companies will screw you and the poor bastard that payed for the ad to be placed in front of some relevant target.
a) "implement" COPPA by using the sign-up form
b) don't care that the profiling of a user leads to showing ads that would fit a 10-year old
c) don't care when other ads clash with the profile consistent of a 10-year old
d) plausible deniability
Q.E.D
It's easy to paint FB employees as cravenly evil cartoon characters, but most FB ads (except ones from the biggest corporations) are "direct response", i.e. not focused on increasing brand awareness but on immediately funneling users to a sales page. FB doesn't benefit from underage kids, who have zero spending ability, from seeing direct response ads (obviously, brand awareness ads on underage people are hugely effective, however), it just messes up their ad targeting. It seems to be a hard problem to solve when you consider all factors.
It's the system as setup which is the problem. When faced with such a hard problem, there are basically two outcomes:
- oh well, carry on then
- maybe we shouldn't be doing these things, and make a drastic change?
I know, the second option is almost laughably absurd.
But I'd give a lot to see a reality TV show where people who constantly criticise big corporations are put in charge of the relevant team for a year (people here being put in charge of FB's ads team; people who want headphone jacks being put in charge of the iPhone hardware design team and having to deal with the tradeoffs) and see how "easy" a problem is to solve. Though them running these companies to the ground might be the goal after all.
They give users tags like "rich, dumb, racist, likes watches, likes big cars".
The reason they might not tag you "possible minor" is to deny they knew in case of something bad happening.
Even if you lied that you are older then 13 years , did the Cam girls company paid FB to show that ad for ages between 13-18? Why? To prepare their minds for the future ?
I expect some other bullshit excuse, that clearly the children lied they are over 18 and as a company that buys ads on FB you should know that FB will probably show ads to those children and you will pay for it because those super genius developers are too busy with more important projects like some new framework, they don't give a shit they waste your ad money, what could you do? put your cam girl ads on the TV?
From the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jul/26/children-lie-a...):
> The survey found that 83% of the 11 to 15 year olds whose internet usage was monitored registered on a social media site with a false age.
> Just over 40% of the children signed in stating they were over 18 years of age, with one even claiming to be 88.
--
> company that buys ads on FB you should know that FB will probably show ads to those children and you will pay for it because those super genius developers are too busy with more important projects like some new framework
That seems like a pretty cartoonish view of FB employees. They are trying to solve the problem. People who argue like you have rarely ever actually had experience running FB ads (more cutthroat than you'd think; FB isn't omniscient despite media reporting). The #1 priority at every large company is protecting their brand (see ex App Store review chief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJeEuxn9mug). Many people (like you) constantly condemn large corporations ("why don't they just...") due to a lack of empathy and inability to put yourself in these people's shoes. If all the people saying "why doesn't Apple put a headphone jack back in, it doesn't take that much space!" actually had to undergo the pressure of working for Apple's hardware design team, they'd understand the tradeoffs far better and spread less uninformed criticism.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/facebook-developing-...
> “We look at things like people wishing you a happy birthday and the age written in those messages. We also look at the age you shared with us on Facebook and apply it to our other apps where you have linked your accounts and vice versa. So if you share your birthday with us on Facebook, we’ll use the same for your linked account on Instagram,” Diwanji explained.
> The social network said that it is focused on using existing data to inform its artificial intelligence technology.
> “Where we do feel we need more information, we’re developing a menu of options for someone to prove their age. This is a work in progress and we’ll have more to share in time,” said Facebook. — IANS
If you want to see how bad it gets, look at how Facebook abuses CSS in order to have sponsored posts say "Sponsored" at the top while avoiding a straightforward place in the generated html that says "Sponsored" and could be matched by adblockers. It's nightmarish.
I've made a lot of content. It's available for free with no ads. I subsidize that work with other work.
If you offer me a way to see the content without ads, I'll go for it. I've bought a lot of content. If the choice is $5 for a movie without ads or a $0 movie with ads, I'll pay every time.
Otherwise, it's the ad blocker for you. Ads are mental poison. And they greedily use my CPU and battery. :) Want a turbo button for the web? Turn on ad blocking.
I was just thinking the other day that I'd probably tolerate black-and-white static ads on a site, like in [paper] newspapers. But these attention-sucking brainwashing CPU-hogging things... Forget them.
That said, I don't block ads. I block trackers and JS, which happens to have the side-effect of blocking almost all ads. If ads appear that don't track me or use JS, I will totally see them. I won't even mind too much.
The online ad industry AFAIK still has not got their shit together.
Until the advertising industry cleans house and abides to some level of standards and ethics I have no qualms blocking every advert I possibly can
It's a good point though, and to add to it: mobile comms companies' ability to track device, and therefore individual locations.
When it comes to ad companies hoovering up data wherever they can I have practically no options to do anything about it, even figuring out which companies have collected my data would be a sisyphean task
The answer, failing legislative intervention from government (I don't think I'll live long enough to see that), is: more people need to block more ads to get the fucking message across.
I don't think I'll live long enough to see that either though.
Additionally, blocking ads should be added to any corporate cyber security checklist - if that happens, that may be more likely to send the message.
This has put me off the platform until they either A) Shift back to the previous acceptable amount of ads. B) Show a negligible amount of ads am willing to compromise on. C) Go out of my way to bypass the ads using a controlled client.
Only reasonable option left here would be C meaning using 3rd party clients that are limited feature-wise and give a worse UX experience than not using Twitter at all. This route in the long run hampers my Twitter experience to the extent that I would rather go back to square one and avoid using Twitter altogether.
Even if you bought the product, you can still hate the ad for making you do so, e.g. by inducing FOMO and by causing more overconsumption, of which you are now a part.
Now let's say instead I publish my code under GPL. And the publisher puts a big disclaimer on the website that you must turn off ad-blocker to view content.
Is it still ethical to block ads and ignore the disclaimer? Note I'm saying "ethical", not "legal". How is that any different from ignoring the LICENSE file and profiting from the GPL code in a closed-source commercial product? Mental gymnastics about what is "really a contract" aside.
To be sure, I block ads, but like other such things, e.g. speeding, I recognize it's a moral compromise I make with myself.
I don’t block ads because they are annoying (although they can be). I block ads because of privacy. Seeing an ad for something I searched for on an unrelated site is creepy and unnerving.
Serve ethical ads: use the page content as the only targeting, don’t use third party ad networks. Just show a damn banner.
Does this not pay the bills enough? Is it more work to chase sponsors instead of just linking in an andnet ad? Started a paid subscription but not enough people pay for the subscriptions and with Adblockers more and more pervasive it’s getting hard to keep the lights on?
Then here is my advice: don’t keep the lights on. Your site doesn’t seem needed if the only way to sustain it was using tracking ads.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m very curious to hear other opinions.
Matthew Butterick describes the effect much better here: https://practicaltypography.com/vote-with-your-wallet.html
Just like if at the grocery store, you could choose to pay or not pay. It would be totally okay not to pay. But if the number of non-paying customers grew too much, the owners would make it mandatory to pay. This did not happen to the web yet.
it was never OK to never pay at a grocery store. But some stores don't want the cost of enforcement, so accept some losses from stealing.
Whether this argument applies to web based ads is difficult to say. I don't agree - but there's valid viewpoints out there do agree.
Or everybody would stop visiting corporate websites and we'd go back to the user-generated web of old, where people created stuff out of love, instead of to get views and sell ads.
Oh how I miss those days. Back then, the advertising industry literally scoffed at the idea of advertising on the "It's just a passing fad" early web [1], and most of the people online at that time were "content creators" of one kind or another, just looking to share what they were passionate about with others around the world.
[1] Source: I used to run a small printing business back in the day, and tried for years to convince advertisers of the value of advertising on the Internet and was literally laughed at…
Not only is the foundation weak, but the advertisers themselves are really, really poor at actually delivering relevant advertising. If 25% of every ad that I saw led me to a product that made my life genuinely easier and/or more enjoyable, I wouldn't mind seeing them, would I? Instead I most prominently see ads for a product or service that I've just paid for, or their competition. Too late? With all the money being spent on marketing I'm disappointed they can't do better.
And worse still, there are people (and machines) flooding what was once a useful internet full of knowledge with worse copies of that knowledge, sometimes algorithmically scrambled and riddled with affiliate links. Too much information! Some good and some very bad. We're in a bad state, and advertising has a lot to do with it, in my opinion.
I'm surprised Oxford University is unable to handle the load from HN. Someone already posted the archive.is link.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to the But-My-HTTP-Requests defense and understand that ads and tracking are the trade I make for reading/watching/enjoying content without getting my wallet out.
I also personally enjoy learning about new products and buying things I might like. Why do I earn money if not to buy things?
To create a safety net for yourself (and perhaps your family)? So that if you were to incur unexpected catastrophic expenses, or lose your job, you would still be able to sustain yourself?
There’s always another job to get. I can always spend less. If something’s truly catastrophic (like healthcare), I just wouldn’t pay the bill. I rent (not interested in owning property) so my exposure there is pretty limited.
I have a pretty big stack of credit cards and would just use those if I absolutely had to. I don’t carry a balance on them now so that’s a lot of freedom in a truly worse-case-scenario.
Plus, I have a chronic illness so I tend to not be too worried about long-long-term. How long do I really want/need to sustain myself for?
I don't need a justification.
I wish there was some kind of Netflix for site supporting. I admittedly don't donate because of how awful some payment systems are. I'd rather log into a site and tick a few boxes to pay.
Though I suspect the answer is closer to the ugly truth: whatever you think you're worth, you're not really worth it unless it's through ads. If people had to think about how they allocate resources, then they'd inevitably decide they can do without in most cases.
It's worth putting serious thought into whether this would actually be a better web; I think it would likely be worse. Most sites today are supported by ads, and if that weren't an option we'd see some combination of paywalls, sponsored content, and sites shutting down.
(I used to work on ads)
Without getting tracked all over the place and being shown intrusive ads. And without an opaque middleman taking most of the cut.
Maybe we need a platform where you pay some fixed amount of money per month and get access to many websites. At the end of the month you can decide how to split your money among the websites you used, defaulting to proportional to the amount of time you spent on the site.
The platform should be open so that anyone can add their website.
Additionally, different sites will have different views, often correctly, on how valuable their content is. An NYT article is much more expensive to produce than a Buzzfeed one, but your system compensates them the same (while the NYT is able to charge a premium for advertising today, plus runs their own paywall).
Your proposal is also pretty exploitable: submit your own website and set the platform to always send 100% of your money to your own site.
I think it would be better. Most ad-supported sites today are pretty much garbage, in large part because they're ad-supported.
Would you include HN there? ;)