Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be a controversial position, but nobody is really arguing the other side, the benefits of ads. And if they were more accepted and integrated (a "perfect" federated model), maybe they could be acceptable rather than abrasive and irrelevant. Who is talking, with a measured perspective, about the shift to participatory, user produced content (yes, I know, a lot of it isn't good, but some is and it is available to many more people without barriers), and the benefits that brings? I just see hand waving about alternatives, some "good old days" ideas about media, and a lot of people accessing essentially free ad-sponsored content with generally minor inconvenience in a murky going-nowhere conflict.

I think as much as anyone Google brings alternatives; I pay for Youtube Premium and never have any ads on Youtube/Youtube Music (places where it would be particularly unwelcome), I get paid for Google Surveys, and I think with some work their federated model could be perfectly reasonable.

If you disagree, please say why, rather than simply downvoting.

I disagree.

1. Advertising is a net negative on the human psyche, it steals attention that could be spent on productive work or entertainment. Proliferation of ad blockers affirms this.

2. Advertising is a zero sum game which benefits corporations with the largest advertising budget and hurts small businesses

3. Ads have expected return on investment or they wouldn't be run => In aggregate we're actually paying for that content with hard cash, so it's not "free content with ads", but "content with obscure, deferred payment"

4. Ads incentivize high volume, low quality, clickbait content. This makes it difficult to find high quality information because the only metric being optimized is the number of eyeballs that land on your website.

By eliminating ads as a funding model, we could eliminate this source of stress (1), even the playing field for small businesses (2), make it clear to users that they're, in fact, paying for the content (3). There's no free lunch, just a blue pill illusion of one.

What we need for web that actually serves its users are not ads, but easy, ubiquitous, private micropayments without middlemen who charge a hefty fee. I'll pay 20 cents to read this article, no I won't subscribe for $20 a month.

Here's my proposal to replace ads:

1. The server does not send the content to you, unless you pay. Websites are responsible for deciding what to give out for free - only public "abstracts" of NYT articles get search indexing.

2. Some browsers keep an account for you, others show you ads and let the advertising companies pay your way through the internet.

3. Anyone who wants to run a server for free or host P2P content may still do it.

All of the advanced tracking technology would be unnecessary if some people browsed through their adsense consumer account and other people ran a tab with their "content intermediary" to pay websites to serve (anonymous) address x.y.z.w.

> All of the advanced tracking technology would be unnecessary if some people browsed through their adsense consumer account

Well yeah, if you do all the tracking officially and up front there's no need to tack it on, but that's not a win.

> and other people ran a tab with their "content intermediary" to pay websites to serve (anonymous) address x.y.z.w.

Thereby ensuring that the intermediary does the tracking.

None of this gives the user privacy.

The content intermediary could offer anonymity as a service and a selling point, like a VPN.

Putting the tracking up front is a win because you'd be able to escape it.

Ads want my attention. It is a limited resource and I don’t want to spend it on ads.

Google in particular are some of the richest companies in the world due to people who can’t or won’t figure out ad blockers. Why they care about mine now I can’t exactly understand.

The answer is probably related to why a paid premium tier negates the value of an ad-supported free tier. A person who can't (or won't) afford the paid tier is probably not going to pay an advertised product, and thus the consumers of the free tier are less interesting (e.g. valuable) to advertisers.

For value to exist in the free tier, it must reach the entire audience. Think about how radio or newspaper advertising worked. If one segment figures out how to avoid the advertisements, it reduces the value of the remaining audience more than proportionally.

My proposal is that my browser downloads all the content, it just does not display the advertisement.

This levels the playing field among traditional broadcast, the content creators get paid and it is just a little less ethical than just getting up to use the bathroom during a commercial break.

If Google and ad agencies want to press the issue, this is really the next step.

1) I do think fondly of the "good ole days" where advertising hadn't destroyed most of the internet, but I concede the cats out of the bag; we're never going to see that again.

2) I think the only benefit of ads is that it staves off the alternative: widespread shilling. inb4 people with binary outlooks tell me that shilling already exits. I'm well aware. But if you plug the advertising hole (somehow), the same garbage is going to come out through another opening.

3) I pay for YT premium as well (which increased in cost substantially this last year). I love their music service, and I love that I dont get YT ads. However, I think this service should also skip over content-creator-placed ads (since they get more $ per view from subscribers like us). Furthermore, I'm starting to see "subscriber only" videos - essentially pay-per-view - which I view as an erosion of the contract. Just like there was erosion in the number of ads in TV over the decades, I think we can expect further erosion where "premium" means you just get "one or two (quite often two !)" ads before a video starts, and the "free" version will just be a cesspool or rate limited to N-number ad-infested videos per hour.

Ref shilling: I think there should be a very straightforward test for whether someone should hit "publish" on a piece of content, or a comment, or an ad bid.

Two questions: "is the place where I am about to publish this content/ad or cause this content/ad to be published by a third party my company's own website?" and then "could I reasonably expect this action to result in a net financial or traffic gain for my company?". If the answers are "no" and "yes" respectively, you should be about to incur a fine which is a double digit percentage of gross revenue for the last financial year, with no opportunity to appeal or reduce. 100% if that revenue was under six figures, to immediately exterminate startups who think advertising is OK.

This deals with shilling, astroturfing, "disclaimer: I work for X and recommend" comment section crap, YouTube sponsors, advertising, blogspam, Substack, Medium, and all the rest. Cause an advert, namedrop, or traffic driver for your company to appear on any site that isn't your own? You just lost your entire profit for last year and then some.

Kick the corps offline, give the internet back to the hobbyists, the enthusiasts, and the academics

For me it's much simpler than this... I don't trust the ads to run on my device. They're often disruptive at best, and sometimes little more than malware at worst. I don't trust ad-tech companies to be ethical and responsible, and I don't trust most site operators to do their due diligence before an ad harms someone.

I also remember what TV was like when it was primarily supported by ads... it wasn't "the good old days," it sucked. It was an era of the blandest, LCD-chasing content that was constantly at the whims of hundreds of advertisers. There's a reason that HBO was such a revelation back in the day, you paid them money and they showed you interesting things.

And frankly what I've learned from the Patreon model of funding is that still works, and most people consuming the content don't need to pay for it; the percentage who can and do are enough. Take the fall of The Escapist recently, where all of the talent was fired/left and then formed Second Wind. Like most successful, but not top-20 YT'ers they make their money from merch, Patreon (currently about 13.5k people sending them north of $60k per month) and sponsorships.

So to me the answer is that ads are a terrible way to make money, and we already have working, better alternative funding models that don't require paywalls (for most content) or embedded ads.

> and sometimes little more than malware at worst.

No, not "little more"; the worst is ads literally using browser vulnerabilities and serving malware.

Even if there's no malware, full screen scary looking pop ups trying to scare non-technical users into calling a "support" number are very common in my experience.

I recently opened YouTube in incognito mode without an ad blocker, the very first video on the home page was a crypto scam video, followed by a Mr. Beast scam when I tried it again a few hours later. Those videos were still up the next day.

Advertisers can cry crocodile tears all they want, they're directly facilitating crime that hurts real people.

Those are fraud, which is already illegal. Regulators should be doing some random sampling and find ad platforms that distribute it. And if there is evidence they systematically allow it for profit reasons then they are coconspirators who should be prosecuted as such.

Without ads how am I supposed to hook up with the hot singles in my area that want to talk to me?

paying for ads to be removed disadvantages weaker more susceptible segments of the population.

see my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38764246

what makes them "weaker" ?

i explain that in my other comment.

I think it's a prejudicial point of view, no? pre-judging someone based on their race and socioeconomic status.

i said nothing about race.

the correlation between wealth and education is supported by plenty of evidence. but that isn't even the strongest argument. the mere fact that people who can't afford to pay for an ad free experience are forced to endure ads already is a problem in itself, even if their level of education is the same as that of those who can afford it.

it is just that the likelihood of being less educated rises with lower income, and that only exacerbates the negative effect of ads, but even without that the effect is bad enough because ads motivate people to spend money on things they don't need which has a worse negative effect if you are poor.

So I need to have ads forced on me because some kid didn’t pay attention in school. Sounds great.

i think you took a wrong turn somewhere in interpreting what i said. :-) for the record, if it were up to me, i'd like to see forced commercial advertising banned completely.

i get your point, you think it's fair to pay for ads to go away. i think it isn't. but that doesn't mean you should have ads forced on you. on the contrary, as it is said in the article, we do have a right to not have ads forced on us, and that right needs to become legally enforceable, but in such a way that we all can benefit from it, and not just those who can afford it.

Display a price-tag on content. You can watch 2 ad breaks, or you can pay $0.05 to watch the video (or whatever it is Google is making off of them). Make it super easy to pay (for example with a prepaid wallet you can refill).

everybody deserves a room of ones own. [1]

ads are just a parasite pretending to provide it, manufacturing demand for overproduced commodities that are mostly harmful for humanity and our environment.

so long as the public library remains upheld as a public institution, with free access to information for all, ads remains merely a parasite slowly eating away at our perception of the public good. and it's no surprise in our rent-seeking, enshittifying economy that the library is crumbling.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_of_One%27s_Own

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