Comment by Grothendank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grothendank | Hacker News Reader

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Should I pay you for what you wrote? No. You wrote it to benefit me, and yet I should not pay you. Curious, right? How would you explain that? I would consider your message a gift, designed to help me correct what you see as a mistaken view.

Am I /truly/ not entitled to free gifts of information from sources that, like you yourself, want to benefit me at no cost to me?

When so much free information exists, why should I be deluged with marketing driven pieces - like this - that I would filter from my view, if I only could? I never want to read pieces that are compromised by marketing and paywalls. And I should not have to, because there are plenty of free things to read.

I could read a scientific article in that time, for instance - totally free, and 10-100x more valuable information. I could chat with a friend, or read an open source code project. Again, free information.

The true issue is not some angel-counting argument about whether this amoral leech of an author needs to deluge people with marketing to eat - that's entirely debatable, and we won't get to the bottom of that debate.

No. The real issue, in my humble if somewhat outraged opinion, is that these ux/seo patterns obscure the words of authors who desperately want to share knowledge for free. And I suspect that's a topic we can find common ground on.

These patterns exist because it's the only way to get rewarded for writing. This might not be important to a humble blogger, but it does to someone investing a lot of time into a corpus of useful information.

The alternative is to pay for what you read, but people won't do that. They won't even donate. Not even after they email you with extra questions, and you offer them personalised advice.

The way I see it, you get a free beer, but there's an ad on the glass and the coaster. If you don't like that deal, you can buy the beer your consume.

You can accept your free beer or you can leave. Just don't get your free beer then complain about the pour. You're not entitled to free beer.

Let me extend the Free Beer analogy.

Suppose the bar where you serve free beer:

1. is an eyesore

2. serves beer I hate

3. bars the entry to vendors that serve beer I love

Then I think you'll find I can do much better than simply being silent about the apparent conflict:

1. I can protest your bar.

2. I can promote the belief that your bar is an intolerable eyesore.

3. I can campaign to have the bar removed from the town square.

In that way, I work to restore access to vendors I love.

That is why I believe it is necessary to picket and complain about this mechanism, reduce the reputation of any author who seeks to profit from it, and foreground the damage it causes: to highlight the fact that it makes it harder to find writings that are genuinely for the public good.

A writer can arrange for their public writings to be fully free. Many writers do that. It's not a privilege. It's a choice based on the writer's values. It is choice based on the value of not extracting profit from the Public Good.

There is simply no excuse for marketing and SEO spam in writing. Writers who choose that route have no more valid reason to expect an income than writers who eschew it. Indeed, writers who do it have reason to expect a loss of reputation.

Again, when writers choose that route, they make it harder for honest writers to have their writings seen. Therefore, writers who choose that route have reason abandon that route and seek a more honest monetization route. Finally, writers who refuse to do that have reason to expect my boycott.

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