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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

I hope that once and for all, we never have to read another HN comment saying "I'd pay for Facebook / Spotify / Prime / whatever" if I didn't have to see ads." They will never remove the ads. Your paying for it simply makes you a more valuable target to advertise to.

Bittorrent skipped a generation due to the 'convenience of these services, but maybe the iPad kid generation will pick up the torch.

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Originally when I started my comment you mentioned watching cable TV (since removed), but I think a lot of people forget that cable TV started out as an ad free service as well. It's just the same bait and switch over and over again. Revenue must be maximized and competition is always either non existent or in collusion.

As I understand it, very few cable channels started out ad-free, and that didn’t last long.

By the time it was available in my area, cable TV was a service to provide better reception and more channels that OTA, but everything aside from subscription channels like HBO were riddled with commercials.

My point is that for most people in the U.S. there was never a bait and switch with cable. It was just more programming (ads). And you paid for it, unlike OTA.

The iPad kid generation doesn't know what a folder is, so I highly doubt it.

It's even worse: a lot of them don't know an ad when it's presented to them.

In their defense, the lines are only getting less and less clear as ads become more and more personalized...

Nah they'll use streaming websites. BitTorrent is too confusing for most people.

Unless you can install a torrent client on an iPad, probably not.

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