Counterpoint - if you like the content enough to go through this - just pay for it. Monetary support of journalism or content you like is a great way to encourage more of it.
I don't mean to excuse incredibly poor user experience design, and certainly not abusive tactics. But sorry if I have zero empathy for your clicking, loading and scrolling pain. Leave the website! It is amazing how many people are defending a site that claims to "Remove popups, banners, and ads" while: 1 - failing to even work. and: 2 - shows it's an ad on the resulting page!
Ok, so we just fundamentally disagree.
While we likely agree there are egregious abusers of both user experience and privacy, I don't believe I have a fundamental right to define how a website is allowed to present their content and/or monetize it. But I do retain the right, which I frequently practice, to leave a webpage and utilize alternate sources in that moment and in the future.
As an exaggerated albeit relevant comparison; this is like saying you don't want police even though there are lots of criminals, you can always just walk away if things look suspicious. This assumes you have the eye to determine what is suspicious. I was hoping I wouldn't have to worry about crime in the first place.
I display a single banner ad on a website that offers a free business tool, as an example.
I also do the same on a free business tool where I also offer a paid, advanced, ad-free version. If a user sticks around for 30 seconds, which most do (average time on both ad-supported sites is more than six minutes), then the freemium site pops up a message alerting them to the paid option.
No obligations and no restrictions on the free versions.
I don't make significant amounts from ads or subscriptions, but I would have no incentive beyond this to continue to offer these services, which many appear to find valuable and use for commercial purposes.
I frequent many free sites/tools that benefit from my visit, and I benefit from their offering for both business and personal reasons. I understand and agree to the transaction occurring.
Outlandish comparisons like you offer completely miss the mark and dilute the legitimate arguments for the use of ad-blockers, which I do believe exist. But I will offer an equally outlandish counterpoint: You prefer a world where over-policing would occur and round up innocent victims with criminals? "Most crimes are committed by males aged 18-25, if we round them all up, we will drastically reduce crime!" Hyperbole, I know. But probably more applicable than your argument for the use of ad blockers.
As I said before, I am not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. Using an adblocker allows for a cleaner, safer internet for the user. No doubt about that. It also, it has to be acknowledged, sweeps the good under the rug with the bad. Period. All-or-nothing enforcement is your proposition. Again, that simply has to be acknowledged. There is no debate there. If you believe that will ultimately lead to a better internet, then that is where we can disagree, as that is entirely subjective.
Marco said said it better than me: https://marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good
I'm not saying you're hiding anything it's just easy to see why you have this opinion. My example was not outlandish and is relevant. Vs the argument you made which was a purposefully dishonest analogy.
My hope is not to state that ads are evil as I don't believe that, just to point out that you are a person who serves ads, I also never state any of the opinions or beliefs you say I did, Have a nice day!
Are all ads, and are all sites that serve ads evil?
I know you visit sites that serve ads. And you may even block them, Gasp!
My choices are:
1) Use archive.ph to read the three articles.
2) Never read a NYT article again.
3) Pay for a subscription for the NYT.
I think you need to be approaching this from an exceptionally legalistic perspective to think that anything but Option 1 is reasonable. If I could pay the five cents of value those three articles are worth, I would, but I can't so I won't.
Standing at an empty intersection, I'm not going to start lecturing someone for looking both ways and crossing the street when the traffic light signals "Don't Walk".
I understand that you might feel that journalism is under funded and that this scofflaw, naredowell attitude is further jeopardizing it. The fact that the reasons newspapers are failing is complex and has less to do with consumer behaviour than it does with other factors not least of which are market consolidation and lax antitrust laws. I pay hundreds of dollars a year on newspaper subscriptions and I refuse to believe that I'm the reason any of that is happening.
I get more peeved at the entitlement many feel to use ad blockers and rail against content producers monetizing their sites, when the choice to not consume the content is an option. Ask my why I gave up twitter a few weeks ago :)
13ft does, I just tested it on https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/us/politics/hillary-clint...
> Regardless, #2 is an option. And the choice is entirely yours.
I can also choose not to read over the shoulder of someone reading an article on the train or averting my eyes at the headlines displayed at a newsstand. Somehow, I can't find in me the slavish devotion to the media industry margins required to do so.
> I get more peeved at the entitlement many feel to use ad blockers and rail against content producers monetizing their sites, when the choice to not consume the content is an option.
This is such a confusing opinion, and an even more baffling to thrust it unto others.
The best thing to do for ones computer safety is to run an ad blocker, as acknowledged by even the FBI[0]. Profiling by ad companies makes our world more insecure and inequitable. I deeply despite selling client data as a business model, as it seems you might as well.
So, your position is that I should both lodge my complaint against their unfair dealings by not consuming their website, but that it is also unjust for me to evade tracking and block ads because it hurts their bottom-line which is unethical to begin with . This sorta feels like chastising me for walking out of the room while TV ads run and deigning to watch the rest of the programme.
Because I'm not an ascetic monk.
> And then thrusting your opinion that all content should be free onto all sites monetized by ads is further confusing.
I'm not telling you to install an ad blocker. I'm just telling you I am.
I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just simply what you are doing. It’s the mental gymnastics these threads are always full of justifying the wholesale disavowal of all ad-supported content that is hard to follow.
That’s glib. It is possible to discern websites that are safe, respect privacy and are generally pleasing to visit without an ad blocker. If you deem them unsafe, leave, don’t log entirely off the internet.
This assumes that the "time and energy to consume" is equivalent to the "price". What if it is worth the time to install 12ft or whatever, but not worth the price they want to charge?
Here’s a simple example for me:
I search Google for how to perform an operation in an Excel spreadsheet. I skip past the obvious ads at the top first. I click on a promising result on a user forum, but first have to click through a popup and then have a banner covering a third of the screen and a small inset screen with a video. That’s too much for me. I stop and go back to Google. I pick another option. And I may remember that forum is not worth the click in the future.
We make decisions like this online and offline every day. The fact is there are many valuable sites and services that are ad supported and done so responsibly. Not all, but many. Ad blockers are a blunt tool. Installing one on grandma’s browser is a constructive use, but not just because “ads are bad.”
Never took off. Should have done. e.g. in Santa Cruz there is https://lookout.co , which is pretty good, but extremely pricy for what it is. There has to be a way between "pay and get everything", "ignore/go straight to 12ft.io".
Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.
Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.
Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.
Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.
Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354>
My alternative suggestion is global access to content through a universal content syndication tax, or fee assessed through ISPs, on a progressive basis. See:
"Why won't (some) people pay for the news?" (2022)
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...>
Discussed 4 days ago on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249571>
There are other things we could mention like, maybe there are many people who can afford NYT but still don't want to pay for it, but that's not what we were talking about. That being said, thanks for the reminder about other countries... I'm sure everyone on HN forgot about globes.
If this was a project to let you watch Netflix or ESPN without a subscription the discord around it would be much different.
Is journalism really less valuable than Stranger Things.
I don't think comparing Journalism to Netflix or ESPN is relevant since they provide quality entertainment (at least in the minds of their base) vs Journalists who stretch out 2 bits of searchable information into a 10 page ad puzzle full of psychological poking.
Yes, most journalism is less valuable than the critically acclaimed fantasy horror Stranger Things. This doesn't mean Journalism is less important or that good journalism doesn't exist. Honestly it's crazy to me Journalism doesn't see more critique. Most just sensationalize, fearmonger, and point fingers.
NYT still has some quality journalism. It's not like that Huffington Post or something
And assuming that no one outside of the US could possibly be interested in US-oriented articles in the NYT - not to mention their world news - is just another example of the insular attitude I'm referring to.
I love to read the news but I don't love that the news reads me.
Well you could buy physical newspapers/magazines. (Or access content via OTA TV / the library.)
Sadly payment models are incompatible with how most people consume content – which is to read a small number of articles from a large number of sources.
If you're looking for something, and it's only available behind a paywall (even a paywall you pay for!), how are you going to find it if it's not indexed?
It is an affront to the open web to serve one set of content to one person and different content to someone else (unless there is a user experience benefit to the customization I suppose).
I place most of the blame on the publishers for doing the bait and switch, but Google gets some blame too. They used to penalize website that sent googlebot different results (or at the very least they used to say that they penalized that). Now, they seem fine with it.
But when somebody shares an article with me and I want to see what I’ve been sent, I’m not going to buy a $15 monthly subscription to some small-town newspaper in Ohio just because they’ve decided to paywall their content in that way.
Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes?
Probably so. I think the differentiation is in the scale at which scraping is done for those kinds of systems.
And yes, one person reading a piece of content without paying money for it is far, far better than one person/corporation scraping all of the world's content in order to profit off of it.
Here’s a similar comparison: “Is a human recording a movie at the theatre to rewatch at home really better than the one who shares the recording online?”
Seeing as you’re calling it “theft”, presumably what you mean by “better” is “causes less harm / loss of revenue to the work’s author / publisher”.
I’d say the answer is pretty clear. How many people go through the trouble of bypassing paywalls VS how many use LLMs?
Saying “a neural network scraping content for its own purposes” doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. Setting aside the neural network is unlikely to be doing the scraping (but being trained on it), it’s not “for its own purpose”, it didn’t choose to willy nilly scrape the internet, it was ordered to by a human (typically) intending to profit from it.
Sure, the journalism industry is progressively being replaced by paid activists, but not all journalists are like this.