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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

Yeah like I hate to say this, but do we need _that many_ sites about cameras, gadgets, games, cars, or <insert topic>?

Do all those sites need to be commercial enterprises with sales teams and large editorial teams? Or could they go back to being hobby passion projects?

Or maybe there's just a handful of them and they are subscription-based for people who _really_ want that kind of news, and the best writers and creators gravitate to those sites and they build a sustainable business that way?

The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area to try their hand at garnering eyeball in exchange for what is ultimately the same repackaged content, because they don't need their users to pay for the content, they just need to draw them in to support the sales of ads or tracking data.

This incentivizes all kinds of user-hostile behaviours in the quest for profit (or even just sustainability).

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You shouldn't hate to say it--it's absolutely true. We don't need yet another listicle site choked with ads competing in a zero sum slugfest for some top organic search result spot. Nobody needs it. The only thing these sites serve is the greed of whoever is producing them. The Internet is worse off the more of these that exist. This shouldn't be a controversial opinion.

I guess I have a slightly more charitable take on this, in the sense that the Internet has an amazingly low barrier to entry for putting your content online and reaching an audience, and I think overall that's actually a great thing.

So I don't begrudge people trying to build an audience by publishing online about things they know or love, but one of the downsides is that the Internet's "content is free" tradition - that comes from hobbyists working out of passion - has led to a whole industry of "how do we make money off people without taking money from them" and that's ads and tracking.

And then the game becomes "how many people can I draw in to my site by any means necessary" instead of "how can I create engaging content".

I think you're about 5ish years out of date.

Most of the sites on cameras, gadgets, games, cars e.t.c. are dead or dying and have been replaced by youtube channels, many of them run by hobbyists.

This is an interesting point in the SEO conversation.

SEO, content farms and content marketing are killing the open web and Google is enabling it, perhaps because they're ok with the web being replaced by 4 or 5 websites, Youtube being the biggest of them.

Ehh sure, that's a take.

There's still plenty (too many?) commercial websites - most that include their own YouTube channel - trying to compete for eyeballs by repackaging the same preview/review/press materials that companies send out..

They're no longer the only game in town though, that's for sure. I don't disagree that many hobbyists (definition up for debate) can compete on merit for the audience, which is awesome of course.

The same rhetorical question still applies for hobbyist YT channels, IMO. Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls.

>Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls.

useful content? which ones? average youtuber incentives (be it through YT or Patreon) tend to just be a community private server on Discord to talk to the creator with. Or cut content that they couldn't air on youtube anyway (e.g. extended commentary on a video that would be de-monitized otherwise. There's way too much competition to lock out signifigant part of a Youtube's channel's content.

Hobbyists who are sponsored by NordVPN. ;)

They represent a small fraction of the hobbyists on the web. The majority that I see aren't wanting or accepting sponsors of any sort.

do we "need" 50 brands of soda, or 300 varieties of cheese?

> The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area

"Too many" according to whom? You?

If no one "needs" them, then they won't get viewers and thus eventually won't get ads, either.

> If no one "needs" them, then they won't get viewers and thus eventually won't get ads, either.

Demonstrably untrue; there are plenty of spam sites that hide themselves and play the SEO game well enough to (temporarily) get my eyeballs. These sites only satisfy a "need" insofar as my grandparents have a "need" to respond to emails from Nigerian scammers.

> (temporarily) get my eyeballs

train your eyeballs better, then. Or theirs.

Why do the villagers keep complaining about the widespread bandit problem when they could simply improve their swordfighting or hire bodyguards?

I'm sure villagers wish they could adblock or PiHole the bandits. would be a win-win situation.

Someone's been watching The Seven Samurai.

Ok.. This feels needlessly confrontational?

Sure, yes, according to me. That was implied when I posted my opinion on here, a discussion forum where we share opinions.

My opinion is that the ad-supported model itself, which doesn't rely on having paying readers/users, but rather on attracting said users to then be paid for showing them ads or collecting their data, has perhaps unintentionally created too low of a bar for entry (in hindsight) and as a result, the fierce competition for profit has led to user-hostile incentives in order to stay alive in such a crowded landscape.

I think the low barrier to entry for putting up websites or creating content online are a net positive, for the record. I love that anyone can just put their content online and compete for an audience on merit (more or less), rather than needing some large monetary investment up front.

But I also think the ad-supported monetize-the-shit-out-of-users model is a bad thing, and benefits from the same low barrier to entry.

But you take the good with the bad I suppose.

> This feels needlessly confrontational

if you make an assertion about there being "too many" of something, it begs for someone to ask how you know this. Almost anyone on HN might ask that. However, you've now added some nuance to it.

I think in general a low barrier to entry is a good thing: most of the music on Bandcamp wouldn't have even been available to the public 50 years ago.

Most of the self-published books out there now also would never make it past the Mean Girl "agents" who populate literary agencies. Most of those books are crap, but then so are the books from major publishers in airport bookstores.

> if you make an assertion about there being "too many" of something, it begs for someone to ask how you know this.

Ah yes, the old "must challenge every statement" gambit. You must be fun at parties.

What's stopping people from creating these hobbyists sites now? Or you from using them?

Discoverability is a problem. The average hobbyist website has no chance of making it to the top of the pile of search-engine-optimized trash websites that are returned by search engines. For example: Quora often takes up half of my results these days.

…and if the hobbyists know that their sites aren’t going to get any visitors, there’s little reason to make them in the first place.

If we just ban all advertising then there are no more SEO optimized sites trying to get that ad-revenue. So hobbyists should have no trouble with popularity if the ad-supported internet goes away.

hobbyists who may one day want to have a lifestyle out of this wouldn't benefit. And those would be the sites that have a reliable stream of content instead of maybe a burst of content for 2 months before getting bored or burned out and maybe making a piece of content every 5 months afterwards.

For all the negatives, a consistent stream is one of the biggest benefits from professional content creators, be it traditional news, Youtubers, streamers, or even bloggers.

Nothing! And I do use a lot of them personally. I pay for several creators on Patreon and subscribe to a few creator-owned website publications to encourage work I care about most...

These are not mutually exclusive things, sorry if I implied that.

My point was more about the race to the bottom with commercial content sites/networks/publications in what seems like a borderless space, with increasingly bad incentives to draw in users.

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