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Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

>It's sort of a shame because we end up with these tools that are designed to inhibit and take away user agency rather than extend and advance it.

People have asked for this. Let me explain.

Incentives are important. They are what drive economic behavior. Companies tend to produce what the market incentivizes. The demand side of the market has shown an unwillingness to directly pay for much of consumer internet technology. Thus it has been produced in such a way as to monetize it in other ways. Ads, data aggregation and reselling, but mostly ads. Very few people are going to paid products that perform better and give users agency, thus incentivizing the market to continue to delivering what it is now, since that appears to be what users want.

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I have a pet theory that this is connected to stagnating wages over the last 40 years or so. If consumers had more disposable income they would be more willing to pay for software.

My small home town of 9000 people could afford to support a man who did only shoe repair.

The shoes cost 50$, so paying him $30 to repair them was an acceptable purchase.

Now the shoes cost $100, but nobody can afford to spend even the original $30 to repair them because they have no money. Also the shoe repair man can't run a business anymore because the shoes are borderline unrepairable, such that even if you replace the sole or any other part, the rest of the shoe is just as worn out and useless.

Most engineering effort the past 30 years has been in making things out of materials that are just barely adequate. "It takes an engineer to put together a bridge that just barely stays up" also means it takes a department of engineers to shave one cent off the BOM of these shoes that also happens to make them last half as long.

> also happens to make them last half as long.

Which again is a "feature" of the design from the company's perspective.

Also, the people making money off ads don’t have a lot of interest in someone paying some money, and then never seeing anymore ads again. They are in fact incentivised to continue the “ad supported is the only way” paradigm.

Just pay for it

"Now introducing ads to your paid service. Dont like ads? You're in luck, We just introduced ad free tiers! Just purchase produkt++ for an additional $19.99 a month"

Also because up until the mobile App Store walled gardens (and all the downsides they bring) arrived circa 2010, paying for software online was slow and awkward. And generally still is on desktop (except for games).

Also because corporate software (ie. anything popular) had a tendency to start complicating the licensing terms. Sorry, that feature is not available in the Home edition. And nowadays you can't even buy a lot of software, you have to pay a recurring subscription.

Though, your "except for games" addition there also points to the fact that the efficient way to get people to pay for software before mobile app stores was games as well, on walled gardens from Nintendo or Atari.

It's the old Gabe Newell line about piracy being a service problem. If you make paying for something so much harder than not paying for it people will either pirate it or just not use it at all.

I'm not sure that people are asking for ads. You explain how they actually are asking for free stuff, while some website owners who want more money, decide to use ads to make more money.

If your goal is to give users what they want, beware of confusing their actual wants with your preferred monetization method. Wanting the former isn't the same as wanting the latter.

How do you find out what people want? A good rule of thumb is to prefer asking them over trying to logic it out. Would most people answer "ads"? No, because they do not want ads.

Nobody wants to pay for anything. If you ask them how they want to pay, they’ll say “I don’t want to.”

But given a choice of paywalls or ads, most people opt for ads most of the time. Doesn’t mean they want ads, just that they apparently dislike ads less than actually paying.

You are correct: if someone is presented with a false dichotomy of "ads vs. paying", and they choose ads, that doesn't mean they want ads, it means ads was the least bad option in the false dichotomy.

I also don't think it's constructive to conflate providing a service with making a profit. Plenty of people are happy doing just the former. If someone want to make more money, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it's not a foregone conclusion that they do, or must, or that the service is contingent on it. Those are all decisions made by each individual provider.

> I also don't think it's constructive to conflate providing a service with making a profit. Plenty of people are happy doing just the former.

Can confirm. I spent years in the late 2000's running a phpBB board to enable discussion on a niche hobby. I spent probably a few thousand dollars on it over several years, we eventually waned in traffic and gave it up as everyone was moving to reddit. I never saw a penny of profit from that, nor expected it: some of our older members were happy to kick some cash my way to offset server costs. As a result, we had a community that was robust, friendly, open to everyone and 100% free to use. No scummy ads, no tracking, no surveillance, no "sponsored posts," none of it. It was glorious and I miss it every day.

I would've happily taken donations to offset the costs, but I never saw it as a money-making operation. Nowadays it feels basically unheard of to do anything online without the expectation of making money.

Sure. I was making a general observation about ads vs. subscriptions out on the open internet where sites generally cost money to run, and sometimes the owners attempt to make a salary from their time, or even make a profit. Lots of ways to change that need for revenue, but once you are hitting 100k+ daily visitors, it’s hard to avoid.

I run multiple small sites for free, and do a number of other activities for free that someone might get paid for. But I know that I’m doing it because I want to and can stop anytime. Revenue also creates continuity by creating a financial obligation…even while it reduces the passion element of motivation.

Maybe then we shouldn't be putting technologies like the internet in the hands of profit-driven companies. Most of the internet driven technology is inherently un-monetizeable, but also very useful, and ads are actively detrimental to the quality of the product. I doubt the users have much say in this to be fair.

The good news is that given how cheap hardware has gotten, there's really no moat anymore. It's fairly feasible to run large scale internet discovery tools out of your own pocket.

This ia truein a free and conpetitive market.

In the case of Meta's properties, consumers do not have agency. They are locked in (through a friend-graph that they cannot export to a competitor) and monopoly abuse keeps killing viable alternatives (like the old stale Facebook purchasing the young fresh Instagram).

People have not asked for this. They have been enticed into a garden "for free" and then locked up inside.

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