Hacker News Reader

Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

Well, I for one don't want to pay $15/mo for my browser: I'm happy for it to be the complement of some company's product.

View on HN

I'm so confused when I read takes like that. The only way advertising can be sustainable under capitalism is if every $1 spent on advertising generates >= $1 of profit for advertisers, keeping in mind that ad networks take a share of revenue, say 30%.

This means that you as a consumer have to spend at least $1 (likely more - profit not revenue) for every $0.70 of value you receive in "free" services. Being supportive of ad-supported services is therefore financially irrational.

They only need to make money in aggregate, they might make $0 out of you, but $2 out of someone else.

This is where tech arrogance comes in. We very much like to believe we’re the zero.

Judging by how much hyper-consumerist behavior I see in myself and my coworkers, we’re not. Everyone is constantly buying shit they don’t need and then justifying it.

Reminder than when you use seemingly impeccable logic and arrive at the wrong conclusion, it's the logic that is wrong somewhere because of a missed assumption.

No, people are not going to pay much for browsers and websites, that's why ad supported products and services exist. Otherwise someone would make better software and charge for it. The only way this works is government intervention, which is what's happening here.

No, people mostly won't pay because ad-supported free alternatives exist.

Yes that is my point.

If you want to prevent such alternatives from existing, you'd need fairly authoritarian measures.

Far from authoritarian, dealing with business models that seem fine on an individual level but that are detrimental to society as a whole is precisely the type of problem that governments are supposed to solve.

I don’t disagree. But that’s literally the definition of authoritarian. Doing things because you have the authority to, because $REASONS.

It’s all flowers and sunshine when you agree with what they are doing but it’s incredibly easy to abuse the power. And suddenly, like compounding interest, you have dictatorship.

>But that’s literally the definition of authoritarian.

It very much is not.

We’ve successfully kneecapped many industries that we figured out where gander onto society. For example, tobacco. No ads, you can’t smoke anywhere. The result? Way less smoking! And we’re all in agreement that’s a good thing.

Ads are private sector propaganda. They’re manipulative material attempting to exploit the weakness of the human mind to get YOU to spend money you don’t actually want to spend. Yes, YOU.

We know things that exploit the weaknesses of the human mind, like nicotine, have the potential for extraordinary evil when left to the hands of the private sector. We haven’t all come to this consensus on advertisement, but we will.

No more authoritarian than minimum wage.

People surviving is a core government responsibility. Business models or companies surviving, less so.

Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.

As the saying goes, if the product is free, YOU are the product.

I think the saying is oversimplified (or else, chrome isn’t a product but a byproduct). It makes a company to make the complement of their product cheap or free so that people can use their product more effectively. Google Search and Ads rely on people having a browser. Similarly, Apple’s Phones and laptops are benefited by including a good first party browser. Imo, a lot of technologies are better as free byproducts of monetized technology than as being some company’s products: there are endless lists of great technologies that never found a market or disappeared post-acquisition.

My ISP is selling my data as well. Netflix is snooping on what i watch for their ads. Chrome is free. Bigger fish to fry than my web browser snooping on me like your bank selling all credit card transactions your car snooping on your driving and your mobile carrier selling your location.

I don't pay for Netflix and a rival good (like ISP infra) is completely different from some compiled computer code (like a browser).

Your phone provider does sell your information.

The majority of Netflix users over the next few years will be advertising based users. That just doesn't bring in enough profit because people are not willing to pay enough subscription to cover what those things actually cost.

Your hypothesis has a bit of a gaping hole where "real world user behaviour" sits.

> Yet you pay for Netflix and your internet and phone bill. But these could be given away by surveillance advertising firms to snoop your watching, surfing, and calling habits.

You do know most of those companies do both charge you and sell your data? Almost the only companies that don't sell your data are big tech advertising companies.

"When you don't pay you are the product" doesn't mean "If you pay you aren't the product", you still are the product the company is just double dipping.

Right. The ISPs and cellphone providers and TV manufacturers are all in on the data collection game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com