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Comment by mrinfinitiesx | Hacker News Reader

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.'

> Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.

No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.

I turned it off in about:config

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> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone

My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.

Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.

I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.

Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.

Oh, for sure. They created a drug that suffocated all non-externally-rewarded social interaction and drew users in. But they created that drug in service to advertisements.

Tangentially related but I think upvote/downvote culture is one of the biggest social changes that we unleashed on the world and should’ve walked back long ago. The intent of the idea is good but I think in implementation it’s too ripe for abuse.

In those old forums, you couldn’t (easily) bury things the way you can today. We basically handed an incredibly powerful weapon to anyone interested in controlling a narrative - especially so with the centralization of everything.

(I want to be clear that I’m aware old forums could be gamed still, and I’m mostly trying to underscore how messed up I consider upvote/downvote/ratio culture).

I ran one too, I don't think it's so simple as that mechanism! Our forums had reputation counts and posts were the attribution point.

We had 'likes' but with actual accounting! For better or worse 'status' could be built with this. Likes, on the other hand, are fleeting

Both systems have perverse incentives, I think the audience - size/shape - matters, and how it all reflects/bounces.

Conspiracy moment: it's harder to fake 'grass roots' things with a smaller/tight knit community, we've been corralled. Once something is as big as Reddit, everything you're seeing is manufactured.

Personally, I think there's truth to the "Dead Internet theory;" less bot focus. Humans maintain responsibility with our choices.

The core problem, as I see it, is copyright.

Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?

Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.

So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?

You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!

So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.

---

But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.

You could argue that greed is the driver. The social networks aren't displaying ads to fund maintaining their operations, they are operating in a for profit capacity and thus are incentivized to find ways to make you want to consume their product.

When someone operated a forum in the days of yore, they had the opportunity to put up ads and many did. The difference I think is that they were doing so to fund or offset the costs of operating the forum, not as a profit engine above and beyond the cost of keeping the lights on.

That's fair. I think all advertising is naturally bad for the world, but you're right that it's the combination of advertising and greed that created the extremely deleterious environment we have now.

That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.

Despite railing against social media for years, I've recently become a mastodon convert. It seems to bring back a lot of the self-hosted phpBB vibe that I also miss. The instance I'm on is run by one guy and the costs are covered by user donations.

There was somewhat of a golden era of independent forums (be them phpBB, vBulletin, etc.), but they were for the most part isolated communities. The rise of social media platforms brought some useful centralisation (lowering the barrier to engage - though arguably OpenID, etc. could have achieved the same), but realistically it has turned many platforms into a hellscape of “idiots”.

I disagree that the centralization was useful. The isolated communities were healthier and funner as a result of being smaller and disconnected from other communities—the isolation worked towards their benefit not their detriment. No one could go trawling through your posts in other communities and decide they don't like you after all because you had an identity there that could be completely different from your identity in other communities.

I think the centralization is actually a huge contributing factor to the decline in overall health of the internet. We didn't evolve in a way that's compatible with seeing everything that our friends say to any of their other friend groups—we're wired for compartmentalized interactions, not global state.

Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.

That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.

If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.

> It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

> It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.

In the beginning there was no ads, but they got pretty aggressive at the end (1999ish)

Geocities is an interesting case. It didn't start with ads and they monitored sites and told people to remove them (I received one such email). It wasn't out of some altruistic ideals though. They just didn't want anyone to advertise before they got their ads running on everyone's sites.

How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary?

How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

Through torrents, for example.

The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.

And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.

> The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents.

Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.

> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.

No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.

The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.

> Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.

I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.

> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.

It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.

> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.

Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.

Seems like you think the whole collection has to be in one single torrent, rather than a separate torrent for each video, and that the complete works of all channels have to be seeded from a single source?

The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.

It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"

> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.

When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.

The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.

> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.

You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.

> which didn't have the volume

agreed

> and quality

filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Agree. Production quality != overall quality. I'd much rather have great content badly produced than professionally produced crap.

Most people still seem to watch Hollywood quality movies so I don't know if your taste is very representative.

High sales != quality. Maybe high sales ~= lowest common denominator?

High sales doesn't mean quality but it does reflect the choice of the majority.

So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.

No, I think the majority would just take what they're given.

Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.

Would they watch so many if they weren’t available at every movie theater in town and every streaming service on earth? A lot of attention has been devoted to such movies that would have been invested elsewhere in other efforts if movies didn’t exist.

If by Hollywood quality you mean that it's professionally produced to a high standard (of production, of course), than I don't see what's bad about that. I only said I value content quality much more than production quality. Great content produced to a high standard is better than the same content badly produced.

There are some great movies out of Hollywood.

> filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.

I would argue that the average quality was higher by a few magnitudes due to the higher entry barrier alone. The average production value is higher these days, but that doesn't correlate with quality too much. Simple truth is that hobbyists, enthusiasts and professionals are often one and the same people.

There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.

With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.

Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.

I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content

This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.

Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right.

> Posting video on someone else's hardware is not a human right

Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.

has anybody tried to argue this here? who are you replying to?

That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.

> That's the general problem of economic inequality, though. It's not specific to the Internet.

Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.

Donations were and are a thing for covering hosting costs in many communities.

Not if the site serves videos and has 2024-levels world traffic.

Cap it at 720p and ask for donations. 2024 levels of traffic should mean donations scale too

> This silences a large number of people

I'd argue advertising silences many more.

Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*

* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.

The thing is, if your community is small costs are probably in the couple dollars a month range. An order of magnitude lower than the costs of hardware like your computer. If communities are large where an individual cannot trivially bear the costs, donation models have worked where the community itself funds its hosting.

Not nearly everybody on the Internet has ever bought their own computer. There's schools, public libraries etc., to say nothing of the billions of people that have only a smartphone and no desktop or laptop at all.

So what? Takes nothing from the point that hosting is in the dollars a month paid for by a half hour of work in most of the western world. I’m sure developing countries have cheaper hosting costs to match to purchasing power in these locations.

I'd happily provide hosting to a whole lot of media that I enjoy myself and would love to share. I might have bandwidth limits each month, but within reason, I'd share.

predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.

Honestly, when the internet was younger the costs to host content were basically zero. Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs. Many ISPs offered shell accounts and provided basic webhosting at no additional cost. These could be scaled up as needed, but everybody with a modem and an ISP had the opportunity to take part in sharing content on the internet.

> Anyone could run a web server on their own PC and run a website for zero costs.

On dialup?

Yes. Websites back then didn't have hundreds of MBs of javascript bloat though so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. The internet over 56k was surprisingly usable.

Maybe in terms of bandwidth, but unless you were fine with never being able to make or receive any more phone calls, how would hosting a website have worked without a second dedicated phone line?

In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.

It did need a dedicated line. Same with the people who ran a BBS out of their home. I knew people who had 3-5 dedicated phone lines running into their houses to support that. Paying per minute for dial up was thankfully not something I had to deal with (unless I was calling into a PoP that was long distance). I can see how the costs of that would get insane very quickly.

I pay my telecom for 500mbit up and down, what other infrastructure must be paid for to support torrenting?

Each individual seeder is paying for electricity, storage, and internet access to make those torrents available to you.

Right, and I'm one of them!

> Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership).

A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.

Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.

> The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.

If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?

BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.

> If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?

Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.

The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.

I might not be old enough to remember when the internet was ad free but I'm 34 and since I've been on the internet, popups and advertising garbage have always been around. I want to say I started using it around 1996-1997

Ad space was sold directly by the website owner, and the ad banner was just static HTML or an image served from the site directly. Then iframes and DoubleClick arrived, and suddenly ads were served from third party sites via iframes, which would load advertiser scripts and it was downhill from there.

> It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions.

It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.

> If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature.

This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.

They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.

This feels like Adblock Plus adding "acceptable ads".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...

Most importantly, advertisement is a business. It's not charity and it's not a publicly owned resource. It doesn't keep the Internet free, because it makes a boat load of money doing what it does. It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you.

Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.

Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.

> It doesn't keep the Internet free

There are two different definitions of free.

Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.

That's the rub. You do pay for it. By the intention and definition of the business, advertisement eventually extracts money from you. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise. The fact that it happens more subtly and enables them to extract money from you in ways that you don't notice doesn't change the fact that it's still paid for.

An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so that you don't feel like you're paying for it. Advertisement is not free money, and it can not be free money. It's for-profit.

So with advertisement, you're still paying for the Internet. We don't have a free Internet. We have an Internet built around businesses that make their entire business around psychological manipulation and extracting money from people without being noticed. The fact that people still push the myth that advertisement enables a free Internet like ad companies are somehow a public service shows how good they are at manipulation.

I think there are legitimate cases where a business has a product available at a price that is net positive to both the business (profitable) and customer (consumer surplus) but is having trouble connecting with consumers. What % of advertising this is versus pushing low quality trash, branding, status symbols, and scams, I have no idea.

I've thought a lot about this because I owned and operated a business for 18 years, for 15 of those years it was my primary source of income, and it was entirely ad-based even though my "users" often complimented me on having an ad-free product. It was all affiliate promotion, they were there for the free content and it wasn't obvious that the free content was promo for subscription services, plus the affiliate links weren't being shoved in peoples' faces. They were there if people wanted more and were willing to pay, and the click-through rates were decent and it was profitable, so this type of "non-intrusive" advertising does work.

But ... I happen to be someone who REALLY DESPISES ADS ALWAYS

I'm not as "black pilled" as the comments that started this. My issue is not that ads try and psychologically manipulate people. I don't think that there is anything intrinsically wrong with trying to persuade someone to buy something.

My problem with ads is that they are annoying and distracting, most are this way by design, and they come at you completely unsolicited.

If there was a way that I could opt in or out of being shown ads in all areas of life, so that if I were interested in learning about new products I can, but if I'm not interested the ads can kindly fuck off and leave me alone ... that would be grand.

And that kind of exists. I mean, if I attend a ComicCon I'm going to a big trade show. I'm hoping that the show floor will have tons of wares and demos and such. I'm looking to buy. If I go on Amazon and start searching for products, by all means spam me with results related to what I'm looking for.

But if I'm trying to watch tv, or I'm on social media or in a context where I'm not actively looking to discover products that I might be interested in purchasing, I get downright offended and triggered when suddenly some dipshit character in a commercial is like: "look how ridiculous and annoying I am while using this product I want you to buy. If you buy it you can be just as moronic, obnoxious and annoying as me." In those situations I wish that advertising would just cease to exist in all forms all together.

I have sometimes bought something via advertisement that I wouldn't have known existed without. As such I'm glad those advertisements exist because my life is better for those things.

Most advertisements are for junk that makes your life worse if you buy, but there are some that are useful.

> Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However

Ads and the spying they depend on only trick you into thinking that you aren't paying for it when in reality, not only are you paying (often resulting with money coming out of your pocket) but you also never get to stop paying for it.

Once your data is out there, it will be used against you for the rest of your life. It never goes away.

It'll be passed around to advertisers, data brokers, law enforcement, lawyers, employers, insurance companies, scammers, retailers, and activists and year after year, decade after decade, every single person who gets their hands on your data will try to use it against you in any and every way that they feel will be to their benefit, and it will almost always be at your expense.

That is not a requirement for advertising. It is how it often works, but it need not be that way. How do we stop all the other side effects is the question. (I don't know the answer to this)

Right. Again, not our problem. We aren't making money off of it, they are, from exploiting us and finding new ways to psychologically enhance their ways of advertisement to make boatloads of money. That's a solid 'No.' - Everything is a giant billboard already, tailored and catered directly to an algorithm based solely on how it knows me better than I know me; I want less of that. The excuse 'it's how we pay for this and that' doesn't have to be acceptable by all of us, and isn't. Eventually enough has to be enough, that time should be now.

I view content. It either exists and is delivered to me, or it doesn't. Either way, I'm blocking it, for my mental health. I see your viewpoint. But, I'm not a metric, I'm not a KPI, I'm not a cost per click, or a cost per view. I don't want my data saved, tracked, bought, sold, manipulated, interpolated, twisted, catered and sprinkled on top to deliver to the next guy. I'm a human being.

I get it, I entirely do, but that's my stance. I'm sticking with it.

I agree with you. I was just pointing out that the idea of advertisement funding a free Internet is already a lie in the first place.

I am 100% anti advertisement, for the record. It is disgusting and non-consensual, and nobody should tolerate it.

I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.

If HN didn't exist people would gather on another link aggregator.

HN is only as good as dang makes it. There are a ton of other link aggregators out there, many more “free” than this. Yet here we are. Why? Because the folks behind this link aggregator pay dang to be here.

There is obviously also a network effect at play here that makes people unwilling to explore new options. But just like MySpace, Facebook or tumblr showed you can always ruin a good thing and eventually people will move onto greener pastures.

However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.

What are they? Can you link to them? Would love to see what else is out there! Personally I don't care much for discussion about web programming really, but more general tech news(fusion, space and the related politics).

For one, https://boards.4chan.org/g/. You’ll see pretty quickly why advertising funded message boards with laissez-faire moderation are a bad idea.

And yet no successful link aggregator has ever been "free" or "open" in a meaningful sense.

Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.

I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.

I think the problem is simply the network effect. Reddit and Twitter are just hard to beat, maybe threads, utilizing the massive Instagram user base managed but I haven't heard anyone use it and I don't think you can force it

Centralization is what makes stuff like this interesting. I come here because the comments are nice, not just because the links are interesting.

It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.

The fediverse gets all those centralization advantages without being centralized. However there are not (yet!) the quantity of people needed to make it work.

Nor quality, unfortunately.

Depends on what you want. some places you can find just as high quality. There is a lot of junk out there to wage through. They also have a "allergic reaction" to the thought of an algorithm to curate feeds which throws the good out with the bad.

I would very sincerely ask what places and what quality?

More like which niche. I find transit advocates do a lot on mastodon. There are also a lot of great open source projects (the curl maintainer posts some interesting stuff). Those are niches I'm interested in though, YMMV in anything else.

> it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.

This is a fallacy. Sounds like you're invoking "revealed preference."

I care strongly that decentralized tech like Lemmy exists... but Lemmy is a dumpster fire project badly managed, so I've given up on using it.

> Matrix

Not a link aggregator.

> Lemmy

Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?

Care to explain how those websites are funded? Would any of them be viable with the amount of traffic of HN (server, moderation etc)?

I come here largely to find out what VC money (and the culture around it) is doing because it affects me (and everyone). Don't mistake that for supporting what VC money is doing.

On a free forum ran by an actual VC even, not just powered by the money...

Yeah but the layout is basic and doesn't use javascript so you know they're cool.

the relationship this forum has to the VC is similar to what a lot of forums had to their operators. There is little direct revenue gathering here - the VCs make money in other ways and spend a small fraction of it on this forum. At most, they advertise their other activities sometimes. The whole web used to be like this.

It's no more ironic than the thousands of Google-related topics on this site that focus on their technology, and almost entirely ignores their ad business that holds up the entire operation and drives their strategy.

If Google drops some pet projects we'll see the same predictable stream of comments blaming ladder-climbing PMs, MBA management, H1B employees, everything other than the simplest explanation, that the powers that be got tired of subsidizing it with the one line of business that actually makes money.

HN does not have extensive server costs. Last I saw (~10 years ago) it was running off a single machine in a closet. Apparently they've since moved to two machines at a hosting company.

But they do employ full-time moderators as well... dang and co. need to eat!

Hey, if the VCs don't want to run this site, I will gladly host it for free.

> They can find other business models other than advertisement.

The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.

Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.

I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.

Article in German about this from August 1: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/klage-gegen-datenschutzbehoerde...

They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.

The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"? Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...

> The question is, can you convince

Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.

I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.

Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.

> I'm afraid that it's a new trend

Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?

And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.

Shouldn't you be happy with paywalling, and with these experiments at monetizing content in ways other than ads?

But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.

> The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.

It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.

All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.

As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.

msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.

I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.

It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?

That's a fair point, but I care also care a great deal about society as a whole, and I feel like the ad model is damaging to those around me. I quite frankly don't get why TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook and others are allow to manipulate people to spend hours doom scrolling, just to show ads. TikTok even knows this is bad, because that's not how they operate in China apparently.

I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.

The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.

I don't like online ads and the web they've created.

Society is full of predators. In the beginning, people got eaten in the jungle, and today they get monitored to learn their desires and then shown pictures of things they want. How do you know you're not being manipulated? Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. Power is focus which means people are disempowered by getting them to focus their attention on things that don't matter. Advertisers normally need to pay cash money to buy someone's attention but you gave yours up for free. If everyone else is watching ads, then you're watching them watch ads. You're not any more free than they are. The simple fact of the matter is you won't be able to save others from this system, because you haven't even saved yourself.

> Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you.

I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.

Which people? Anyone who tells me I should care about people in general, I always assume it's an attempt at manipulation, because it's an illogical way of thinking.

At this point, "those dark Internet spaces" includes most news on most subjects. GitHub is great, but it can't be my entire world.

News is a narcotic that, like ads and social media, preys on human weakness. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the purveyors of news would partner with purveyors of ads, similar to how casinos like to partner with alcohol and tobacco companies.

You mean poor news, right? There is such a thing as news, coming from reputable sources, at least, as reputable as a friend of a friend. We can agree to start from the position knowing all news information is biased, but if you still end up with that view, where is the learning coming from?

News isn't just biased. Modern technology gives us the power to get news from the source. In the past, a reporter would report on something that happened to a person. Today, that person can just post what happened to them on Twitter. Where do you think journos get their information from? The only reason to have another layer is to curate, decipher, and explain the raw information. That means applying bias. In fact it means news is bias in today's world, which is fine if you're aligned with the person doing it. For example, internal newsletters at companies are a great source of information, because your interests are intertwined. But you might not necessarily feel that way when it comes to media organizations that are mouthpieces of the state. Algorithms like Twitter are a much better system, because the worst bias they can inject is curation. They can't do spin and they can't assign meaning. At least not if you're only looking at the raw feeds. If you limit it to "Following" then it can't curate either, so the platform is capable of providing a small corner we can choose to be in that has zero bias other than your own.

I don't get your point. You are describing a world I do not take part in, I think for myself. And make adjustments appropriate to me. Your points are mostly circular and decidedly lacking in irony. I repeat, if what you say is so true, how do you learn? It sounds as if the barest of truth is out of reach, no matter what. How do I thus gauge the content of your words?

If by truth you mean facts, then most news is factual. Non-facts are easy to disprove. News is about glomming beliefs and emotion onto facts, similar to how advertisements get attached to web pages. If you're looking for truth, look to math.

That's not what news is at all. That's biased news. And not facts either. You might be confused with talking about how one projects feelings on to stories, filter internally, and, inevitably, bias them all by oneself.

I agree that ads are basically here to stay, in one form or another. And that most people arguing that the internet could migrate towards another model are probably wrong (people want free stuff, and a lot of people don't even mind ads sadly enough...). But I think that the user agent (the browser) shouldn't care at all about the sustainability of businesses or how viable blocking ads are for tech businesses. It should just do what's best for the user, or at least give the option to do that.

> focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price

We’re a minority. See: every comment complaining about paywalls.

You're arguing that speech should earn a living, which sounds like asserting everyone has the right to patronage.

Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.

Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.

> You're arguing that speech should earn a living

I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.

Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.

> No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us.

The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.

And free beer isn't free because you still need to pay for gas to haul it home?

That certain parts are locked off also doesn't make the internet as a whole not open.

mozilla used to have this smart guy, brendan something, as their cto. but he was chased out of mozilla and created a new browser called brave. it actually does what this current cto claims to be trying to do

>> allows the internet to be free

As far as i know I still pay for internet. Only free internet is with public wifi.

You pay for the pipe to your house (which in turn pays for the backbone). However the content is mostly things you don't pay for.

Yeah, being against advertising isn't fundamentally about privacy. I mean, I care about privacy too, but even an ad that collects no data about me is bad. I simply do not want products shoved in my face. If I need something from your company I'll come to you.

Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.

Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.

> is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone

The internet is free to hardly anyone. People pay for broadband and mobile plans.

Free Wi-Fi hotspots are what actually keeps the internet free for many people.

Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).

That's the thing... people would still make free content, and since there wouldn't be as many shady ways to monetize, it would cut down on low-effort (and AI-generated) garbage. The internet would be such a better place.

We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.

I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage. The high effort non-garbage stuff is produced by professionals who have the luxury of spending a full work week's amount of time improving their craft. writers writing free content with no business model can't do that unless they have a trust fund. which, I suppose they're out there, but I doubt the number of those that are writers.

> I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage.

Right now the main search engine everyone uses is run by an ad company. Just getting rid of that conflict of interest would probably help to significantly weed out garbage.

I'm pretty confident that without advertising, the majority of YouTube channels people love most would not exist.

maybe overall that would be a good thing as there's so much trash too

And that's fine. YouTube channels are always better when they're someone's hobby rather than a full-time job.

hard disagree. the majority of the channels I love the most have become full time jobs.

I'm pretty sure ad revenue for most channels is negligible so they resort to third party sponsorships or platforms like Patreon. The advertisements are there for Google to recoup some of the cost of running YT.

not sure what your point is. let's assume it's true. That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos. Without that those channels would have to pay for hosting themselves and could not afford to make the content.

Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start

Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc... which means even without YouTube's ads they're still ad driven

> Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly

Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.

> That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos

Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.

> Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.

That supports my point. Ads are paying for the content.

Youtube didn't have ads for years. Yet there was plenty of content people uploaded with no expectation of payment. Just like the early Internet. MIT OCW and Khan Academy also pre-date YT.

As for all the high production value channels out there now, YT doesn't pay their bills, subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise do. YT is like MTV: good for exposure, the real product is sold through other channels.

Most of my favorite channels make more money from one or more of:

1. Premium subscribers

2. Direct support on Patreon

3. Direct video sponsorship (a form of advertising, but wholly tolerable IMO)

4. Direct support by joining Nebula, which has no ads

I don’t know if it’s still true, but at least up until relatively recently, #3 and #4 were the same thing; Nebula paid its creators in YouTube sponsorship. (i.e, if you were a Nebula creator, you got “paid” by Nebula buying sponsorships on your YouTube channel)

3 is ads and fits my point. The content wouldn't exist without ads.

I remember an internet without ads. It was hardly all low-effeort garbage.

That's the GP's point too.

Most people won't pay for content, no matter how good it is.

Especially for text content.

People still download or stream movies and TV series even though there are multiple high quality and official streaming platforms.

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