Hulu is A/B testing ads in the pause screen – this is bad for society | Hacker News Reader

Hulu is A/B testing ads in the pause screen – this is bad for society

omarshehata.substack.com

4 pointsOmarShehata9 comments

I pay for Hulu. If I start seeing ads after paying >$20/month for it, why would I pay for it instead of torrenting web rips?

To be fair, I have the tier with ads. I'm fine seeing ads in the middle of the show. Or even every time I un-pause if they REALLY have to. But covering the pause screen itself is just inexcusable. It breaks functionality. There's no good reason the company should do this, even for profit. It's damaging, there's better ways to make profit.

I think the problem is that, even if they are making a profit, it’ll never be enough. They’ll add more ads to your ad tier, or add ads to my paid tier. You are captive because of media copyright and licensing, cattle to be milked for returns. And so, one must vote with their dollars and local storage if the UX degrades in pursuit of financial demands leading to enshittification.

Edit: I’m trying to be reasonable, you know? Services cost money, this is fair; have to pay COGS for everyone involved to get the bits to my devices. But the relationship is always in tension. I can go without, I can source the content elsewhere, etc. But mess it (the experience, broadly speaking) up and I will bail, you are competing with free. Disney owns Hulu and they’re are doing just fine financially (~$174B market cap, ~$90B/year in revenue). Don't mess it up, I want to give you money if I am getting value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

“I think the problem is that, even if they are making a profit, it’ll never be enough. They’ll add more ads to your ad tier, or add ads to my paid tier.”

Time for a new tier. Limited ads.

> I very rarely see meaningful criticism of ads in mainstream discourse. Most criticism is of the form “ads are evil, burn it all down”. This is silly. The reason people who hate ads aren’t making any progress is because ads are actually good for civilization. If you ever succeed in destroying ads, people are going to reinvent it, bottom up, by running around yelling in the street. You know, like we used to:

Can you say more about why you believe ads are good for society? This paragraph just says they're inevitable, but it doesn't mention anything about them being good.

In short it's about helping people who are making genuinely useful products find the audience who genuinely needs them. "If you build it they will come" isn't true. People need to find out & understand when something they're looking for exists. It's true of small town businesses and global products.

I think it's worth taking a step back and considering what a better world looks like, solving this problem without ads. I can envision a "pull" model, where you always seek it out vs it being pushed on you. I think people buying things they don't want or need is not good. If someone can propose a way to make the "pull" model work, and we can try it out, I'd be all for that experiment. And I hope they'll write it about it so we as consumers learn and demand better of companies we use.

Last time I used Hulu they would show me the same ad during every single break. Making me aware something exists is one thing, punching me in the face with it every 7 minutes is another. By the time I’m done watching, I’m so sick of hearing about it that I never want to see or hear about the product ever again.

TL;DR: having ads in the pause screen is bad UX. I can't pause and read things, or take a picture, or a screenshot, etc. It's bad for the consumer, AND bad for the company.

I want to see more criticism of ads from people who believe ads are good for society. I'm trying to fill this gap here.

>this is bad for society

I understand what you are saying, but how good could it get?

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