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Comment by loteck | Hacker News Reader

> This is how the internet should be, free for everyone, without censorship and restrictions.

I wonder if the author writes this content for free or if they expect to be paid. Given Ghacks' privacy policy where 12+ categories of personal data tracking are in use, including precise geolocation, I suspect they do expect compensation for their work, and that it is funded through targeted advertising that requires surveillance tech and data gathering.

If the choice is between publishers setting prices for their products or readers being forced to unwillingly participate in the advertising surveillance industry, I'll take the walls.

But there probably is no such choice. The money Ghacks makes collecting and selling sensitive personal data is probably so sweet it couldn't be replaced by subscriptions.

Just saying, the author should probably think a little deeper about their "free for everyone without restriction" idealogy.

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I grow tired of folks thinking that every journalist somehow magically has control over the business activities of the site, and use that to undermine what they say.

Enough already.

It is these journalists' own choice to publish those words within that context or manner, and they of all people should understand the implications this has on the perception of their validity.

Are you’re saying that they shouldn’t even bother to try and effect change?

Not implying anything beyond what I wrote

If it was you, @donohoe, who downvoted my previous comment, then perhaps I misinterpreted your question and would kindly invite you to rephrase it

No, I did not down-vote it.

The statement "this is how the internet should be, free for everyone, without censorship and restrictions" comments on the business activities of online publications, without offering any alternative.

It's pretty on-topic in this specific instance.

The author also wrote "Top 4 Chrome ad blockers that you need to know about"[1] which rails against ads. So they don't want paywalls. They don't want ads. Then what?

It seems their views on all of this are rather unsophisticated (yet they still make broad sweeping statements about it).

[1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/08/12/best-chrome-ad-blocker-ext...

If I had the ability to use the internet and never had links to content that refuses to be presented with out ads or paywalls, then I would gladly do so. Unfortunately that isn't an option, so I use ad block. I am convinced that 95%+ of the content we view on the internet today would still exist if there was no way to monetize it. But because it's monetized, we have the same news story, same recipe, same how-to guide, etc all repeated a million times over. It creates a ton of garbage and fluff and noise that brings no value to the planet to be duplicated so many times.

When I meet a paywall, I hit the back button.

When too many JS pop-ups appear, I hit the back button.

Rarely does a website deny access when they detect ad-block, but I’ll happily hit the back button.

Website owners can do whatever they want. I’m not going to look at ads, and that’s a personal choice.

That's a good argument for why they should be allowed to put those things on the website or install those types of technologies. But it's not a good argument for why I shouldn't be allowed to do whatever I want with my computer.

Well you are... But Mozilla is allowed to do whatever they want with their computer (server) too...

And in turn we're allowed to criticize them for it.

On mobile it's a different story, they don't let you install custom add-ons at all.

I use Firefox Nightly on Android since it allows all add-ons

It allows all on AMO, as far as I can tell you cannot add an addon directly from github for instance like you can for the desktop browser.

Only from the repo. That's the problem due to this removal.

On desktop you can still add the XPI manually but on mobile Mozilla doesn't alow that for whatever weird reason.

The primary author of the website (Martin) sold the website to Softonic https://www.ghacks.net/2019/10/07/ghacks-has-a-new-owner-and... .

Yeah, I'm not sure you've exactly said it, but what you see with most walls, is that you can pay for the content, but they USE that payment info to track you and sell it to make even more!

I'm appreciating the down votes. Perhaps YT or Apple don't sell info (for how long?), but HBO, NYT, Disney, and of course Amazon certainly do. Conde' Nast, and probably and your favorite blog/mag as well. Is it surprising, there's money on the table and an identifiable account!?

It used to be said that if you aren't the customer you are the product. Now we get to be both the customer AND the product.

No, you have it wrong. Journalists should live off air, sunlight, and river water. They have no need for money and expecting to get paid is simply greedy.

Nobody is forcing people who want to pay, to not pay. Most news papers make more or their money from advertisers, promotions, and such sources.

Journalist != newspaper.

if the journalist works for the newspaper, then the dichotomy falls apart. Journalists that are independent can use platforms like Substack, where their readers would pay them.

The New York Times makes considerably more money from subscription services than from advertising. That's a recent (last ten-fifteen years) pivot.

You can’t force people to value what journalists produce and the reality is most people don’t value it, like at all.

Most people simply aren’t going to pay, so articles/sites might as well go behind a hard, credit card and login enforced paywall at this point. That way only those who pay can get access, there’s no workarounds, any republished articles can be easily DMCA’d, and republishers can be banned/sued.

Easy to bypass soft paywalls are going to be bypassed no matter what publishers/writers do, so it’s time to take a harder stance. If their content is economically viable they’ll be fine.

Frankly I was legitimately hoping this would be the viable use case for crypto. Allow a JS miner to run while you read and the profits go to the publisher. Like everything else crypto it was a dead on arrival idea thanks to bad actors.

I do think people value it, even the people railing against the "lamestream media" or whatever they call it these days value journalism as a concept, which is why sites like Breibart and such exist. I suspect many people are also willing to pay; the thing is that it's just hard to compete with free: why pay when you can get the same (or something very identical) for free? It's kind of a race to the bottom.

Journalism in my country dumped the early internet formula and are now behind paywalls. They are making a profit.

In rich countries there has always been and always will be an elite that values and can pay for information. Subscription is an old model that has proven to work for centuries. The government official working at the foreign office reads a quality newspaper.

Media almost commited suicide when they adopted the advertising model.

The vast majority of journalists are barely performing what any rational person would call journalism, and for the most part they're providing "journalism" on the same shit that 50 other journalists are covering too.

Your points are about the website "ghacks" ot about the plugin?

there is no relation between he add-on, its maintainers, and the site this article is hosted.

My comments are about the quotation at the top, which appears in the article.

Are you referring to the author of the article or the author of the plug-in?

"I wonder if the author writes this content for free or if they expect to be paid. "

I would think that the fact they make the filter list available to use for free in uBlock Origin answers this question. They may hope and expect you'll use the extension that (to judge from other comments) talks to Google Analytics. But they are clearly not expecting to be paid in the way the Wall Street Journal is. Not saying that invalidates your point that content producers deserve to be paid; just saying you can't prove it with hypocrisy.

This is why I'm pissed that Twitter bought Scroll. One of the more successful attempts to date at an alternative funding model for content producers.

I don't mind newspapers using paywalls. I even pay for a couple of newspapers myself.

I just wish Google search would block all such newspapers. I'm probably not going to subscribe to any more newspapers, so all the walled results are just extra spam on top of my search results.

It seems to me newspapers want to have their cake and eat it too.

> I wonder if the author writes this content for free or if they expect to be paid.

Does your personal expectation of getting your business model validated enjoy the privilege of stifling everyone else's ability to benefit from a free internet?

I mean, the internet was already around way before paywalls were invented.

And does your business model enjoy this exclusive privilege or does each and every business model have the right to strong arm everyone you deem a market to lose rights?

Choice between trackers or paywalls? What colour would sir like his unicorn?

The Times is one local example of a paywall site. They demand a subscription, and still show targeted ads full of trackers. These companies aren't looking for alternative revenue streams they want additional revenue streams.

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