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Comment by CodeSgt | Hacker News Reader

You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using. There are vast swaths of t people for whom an additional monthly subscription to watch YouTube, have access to email, read the news, browse social media, etc just isn’t financially tenable.

Especially in the year 2023 where technology and internet access is so crucial to survival, I’d prefer for a low-income family to not have to choose between a meal and renewing their monthly email subscription.

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>You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using.

No, I'm speaking from the position of someone who believes we should use fewer (or even no) services, be it Gmail, or Figma or Spotify free tier, or whatever.

There's always FOSS software. There's also freemium (no ads, just reduced functionality to lure someone to the premium full-featured version), and of course freeware.

Ad-supported also has a cost: the ad-induced consumerist spending is one of the biggest expenses people make (disproportionaly so for poorer people). And there's also the jacking up of product costs to cover an ad budget. Plus the social cost in multitude of ways (from the advertisers having influence over the service provider, to personal data being harvested and sold).

Well, keep the costs at the level that ads make instead of requiring to overpay 100x.

That's probably less than you pay more for your phone for more traffic and power to display ads.

More interestingly, where does all the money for ads (this for Google and the service showing ads) come from? It's paid by all consumers already.

This is a good thing. By requiring paid access to more websites, you might find there’s less people spewing garbage in comments sections etc, since they can’t really afford a bunch of accounts to just troll around.

They wouldnt be very expensive. Advertising is very inefficient and the payment per view is already very low.

Yes things cost money. Why should the poor be subsidised in viewing a website when they arent buying the expensive products being advertised on it?

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