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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic.

One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.

But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.

Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.

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Also, back in the day, some of us had a fair number of magazine subscriptions. But, really, at peak it was a small percentage of the number of websites I look at at least now and then. Consumption has generally changed and most of us are skittish about subscriptions generally even if we have a few.

The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.

I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.

> Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.

I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.

Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.

RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.

It's not your customers' fault that your business model is not viable, and guilting people into turning off AdBlock is manipulative and detrimental to overall human productivity. Asking people to watch ads is simply a bad trade off, in the same way that burning trash to save on fuel is bad -- to save 1$ in fuel costs, environmental damage in the thousands is caused. To make 1$ from ads, many multiples of damage in lost productivity and bad product proliferation are caused.

Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.

In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other people.

/Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in the long run./

The virtue signaling part of online tech discourse is probably my biggest dissatisfaction with it these days. I hope you're using Kagi because Google is unethical oh and using Matrix because Discord is evil oh but you're using Gemini because the web is all cursed and sorry you're using Signal for your private communications right? Twitter is evil now Mastodon right? Hope you aren't using Reddit but Lemmy. "Enshittification!!"

Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are. I pay for YouTube, Telegram, and Nebula, self host Matrix, use and run Bluesky infrastructure, and a few other things but I'm the first to admit I'm in the minority. Not only that but it's time consuming! Meanwhile in tech discourse everyone is using Kagi for everything and "it's a breath of fresh air" or whatever.

That's why the saying "actions speak louder than words" exists...

In any marketing research it is well-known that what people say they would pay for and what they actually pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.

But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I think they are right about the "written" part. These days the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.

A huge part of this is because there is often no other option to pay, and when there is there's a ton of friction involved. We know how much little frictions add up when people are trying to buy a product. They have to have even more impact on someone who wants to donate. I definitely spend more on my Apple devices due to easy Apple wallet integrations. I'm not going to pretend like I'll go out and start donating to all of these websites. But if the anti-popup blocker modal had something as easy as an Apple Pay button, I'd definitely consume more of that style of content if the fees were reasonable.

I'm not sure what skeletons you think are being pulled out of the closet. I do the same as the OP, if there is an option to pay I do that, but I will always ad block. I feel for you if you can't make money without ads, but I'd rather see the world burn than be ad driven.

I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like. Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my life. It's as simple as that.

You cannot see the virtue signalling unless you see the traffic metrics and revenue sheets.

Everyone says they pay to support, very few people actually do.

Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted. It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even think about it.

> the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit

What numbers?

Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence doesn't work here.

The only one I've found that passes my test (no ads if you subscribe, and equally important, all the tracking crap is also gone), is ArsTechnica. I check the stories several times a week, so I'm happy to subscribe under those terms.

For every thing else I use adblockers.

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