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Comment by joeythedolphin | Hacker News Reader

Bless you! In my late 30s, I went serious about getting ads out of my life. I noticed they were propaganda and brainwashing usually with seriously dark undertones. I stopped watching sports and TV, stopped reading news articles, stopped looking at billboard highway signs, etc. I had no idea how much the advertisements controlled how I felt and thought. I wish we could have stricter laws against advertisers. I believe people would be much happier if they took an honest look at their tradeoff of "free things" for advertisement glances. If people did this, I believe we could radically transform our society, and live in one where advertisement is small, and people give small amounts of money to the things they want to see.

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wont help much because people are themselves walking ads, always self promoting, constantly mirroring what they are told from somewhere else or by someone else

> In my late 30s, I went serious about getting ads out of my life.

Have you also cut everything out of your life that's financed through ads? So I'm expecting you to not use any Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube or other modern web content.

I agree that ads are manipulative. That's their very essence. But they exist for a reason. Not to enrich people, but the uphold one side of a bargin. You can't expect everything to be for free.

Please spare us this moral preaching. Google is block ads because it hurts their bottom line. They could care less about the people who actually make the things people come to the platform for.

All of the examples exist there to enrich those running the platform, and not for the benefit of those producing content. Those companies are worth what they’re worth now because they only pass on a pittance of the advertising money they draw in.

I'm not even talking about those producing content. It's their choice to upload things.

But the platform itself needs to be paid for as well. You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.

A) for a long time most of them did not provide an option to pay to remove ads.

B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under. For example: YouTube chose to centralize and host all of the videos itself, and it chose to continue pursuing that route rather than experiment with technologies that could distribute that load and make their server costs significantly decrease. Why? Because it gives them a choke point with which they can extract money and leverage over everyone else.

Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

> B) Many of these companies have such large content hosting fees because of the very nature they chose to set up under.

If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor. The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

> Further, just like I don’t have a right to tell Facebook how their computers should run, they don’t have a right to tell me what my computer has to display.

Correct. Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

> The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

It would only be evidence for that if there were multiple strong competitors to youtube that use similar methods. The dearth of competition suggests that other forces are the cause.

There are competitors, but they also use ads.

Consumers just don't want to pay for things they've gotten used to getting for free. You may not like it (I don't), but that's reality. Being angry at "big tech" for this is relieving the general population of their responsibility.

What competitors do you have in mind there? Do any of them get even 5% as much traffic? 1%?

Vimeo wants hosting fees for significant use, there's a few decentralized platforms without ads, nebula charges and doesn't have ads. Dailymotion fits the mold but this ranking site says they get 0.4% as many visits and each visit is 1/4 as long.

I'm not saying that things should all be free, I'm saying that youtube's "economical sweet spot" is one that is basically competition-free and because of that we can't learn much about what other viable forms the market could take.

> The fact that there is no such thing is strong evidence that they've already hit the economical sweet spot.

This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.

Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits and creating a system where it’s difficult for either side of the network to go elsewhere? Cause it’s not optimized for providing most of the revenue to the people creating the content.

Further I’m willing to bet that most of these services would be significantly technically easier to run if all of the advertising and tracking aspects were stripped out. Which in turn means that it may be possible to architect them differently since you now have different requirements and constraints.

> Nor do you have a right to tell them not to try to prevent you from avoiding that ads are being displayed on your computer.

Correct. I never argued to the contrary.

The thing to keep in mind is that they need us more than we need them. The world existed and functioned before all of these companies and will continue to do so after they’re all gone.

> This is a simplistic take. First of all, even if it’s true now it does not make it true for all time. Blockbuster hit a real sweet spot for video rental until the tech landscape changed under their feet.

True. I'd love to see a competitor someday whom I can just pay and then have a Facebook-equivalent and Youtube-equivalent that doesn't spam me with ads and does not collect my behavioural data to profile me.

I think people would just be shocked how much they would need to pay for their FB account if that would be an alternative offering. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2022 FB had a revenue of about $116bn. With about 3bn users. Let's say half of those are actually dead accounts that people almost never log into. (And that's very generous, this number is probably much higher.) That leaves 1.5bn users. To generate $116bn you'd need $77 from each of them. I know very few people who would pay that much money every year to see their aunts cooking results and their uncles Trump posts.

> Secondly, and more importantly. Economical optimal for what end? For extracting profits

Yes. That's what our market-based economies are optimizing for. Other economic models have not proven to be viable.

I disagree with the framing of the back of the envelop calculation.

First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.

Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.

By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.

Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.

> If an economically more viable alternative exists then you are welcome to create a competitor.

Yes, I'm sure google will be very happy to show videos on my platform rather than on their own first in the search results.

There is no obligation on you or I to provide those companies with a viable business model, nor any moral compulsion to cooperate with their invasive, privacy and mental-health degrading ad-based monetisation strategy.

edit: My browser, my rules. Don't like 'em? Feel free to go out of business.

>You think Youtube should provide video hosting for free? Facebook should provide their .. social network stuff for free? Twitter should serve tweets for free? No? Then either pay or watch ads.

Not GP, but that would be nice. What would be even nicer is if each and every location that one of those organizations, as well as everyone who works for them or chooses to invest in them should be destroyed/die slowly and painfully.

If that were to happen, the world would be a better place.

Is that a fine enough point, or shall I elaborate further?

Edit: Fixed typo.

Honestly, I think Facebook and "social media" in general would be way better if they were paid services.

It's easy to think that people won't pay for such an experience. I think that's naive. There are plenty of examples of people being willing to pay for a premium experience when free/cheap options are available, like these:

- Apple convinced a LOT of non-audiophiles to pay $249 and $550 for Bluetooth earbuds and headphones (respectively).

- OpenAI is convincing millions to pay $20/month for ChatGPT+.

- Krisp makes a bunch of money over something that has a free alternative (software noise cancelling) because it's just THAT good.

- Tesla convinced a LOT of people to buy a Model 3 or Model Y over the Camry or Accord they were originally going to get.

I would LOVE to use Facebook or something like that but am not willing to have a non-governmental entity surveil my every move online in exchange, nor am I willing to be subjected to an experience that is constantly trying to get me addicted to using it.

It's not that some subset won't pay, its that it wont "grow" at the idiotic volumes that SV VC-based thought requires.

The 'infinite growth at all costs' model has rarely been seriously challenged, and as a result its become blase to think of a smaller scale but more stable and consistently successful business, and instead everything needs to lead towards monopolized or cartel-like "Big Tech".

It's a farce.

>> There are plenty of examples of people being willing to pay for a premium experience.

That's true but their number will be extremely miniscule compared to freeloaders who love to consume a freely available resource!

In terms of "revenue/cost per user" metrics (which is more commonly used in IT industry), the ad model thus topples down the subscription model in the eyes of decision makers?

We have a saying in my country that roughly translates to “Stupids gift, but who don’t take are idiots”. If you give something away for free, there will be always someone who takes it. Facebook is free, and people were using it. But they left once people got exasperated due to ads and other stuff. TikTok is free now, but you’ll see a similar migration once the enshitification process begins.

I don’t have ads on YouTube in my country, but my feed is still being manipulated (it’s eery to see how they want my attention). I travel or use a VPN and the experience goes straight down the drain. I could pay, but would they stop manipulating the feed or collecting my data? I’ll be using YouTube as long as they keeping it free. If it becomes paid, I will if the terms are worth it.

I think it's impossible to get it down to 0, but yes, all though services were worked out of my life. I don't expect them to be free, I expect to pay for more services than your average person, and that's the point of my above post.

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