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Comment by jjfoooo6 | Hacker News Reader

In other words, it is that it's going to be very difficult for users to intuitively understand what "half ads" means and why they should pay for it.

It's a completely nonsensical compromise. Musk's product ideas for Twitter seems to assume that what everyone wants is for Twitter to be more complex, with more knobs to fiddle with.

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There's a simple way to make this legible to the user: instead of slashing ad frequency, eliminate half of ad surface. I.e. if there are N places on the page where ads are being served, turn off half of them for the paying users. This will be an obvious difference, and remain so even as the ad intensity/frequency increases.

but there aren't N places on the page where ads are shown, there's one place: in the feed, at an unspecified frequency as you scroll. twitter doesn't have any ad surfaces to eliminate.

Yes and be just as anoying. I'm not sure that anyone would see a value of just seeing half the amount of ads on a page.

Half of ads is strictly more valuable than all of them. Whether or not it's worth $8 is another question, but people still forget it's all a supplier-driven market: there is, and is not going to be, an option to pay $8 and get no ads. You choose out of what's being made available.

Strictly more valuable, sure. But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy. And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.

> But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy.

Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad load, but also all the other things like better reach and the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...

> And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.

Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through the app, and blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser. Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.

"half" means less annoying. It's not complicated for users.

It doesn't mean "less annoying" in a meaningful way when the baseline can change drastically and without warning.

Because every engineer knows that 99% of the customer base of their products are fellow engineers.

Clearly not. It would be a touch screen control. Knobs are too simple.

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