For me, it is a straight forward proposition. There is literally nothing online so far that has ever interested me enough to pay money or with my eyeballs. I either see it without ads or move on without even a moment of thought.
I would like to say I've only run into one person like this, but no. I've lost count of how many of these people I've run into. I like to think I'm pretty good at understand other people's point of view, even if I don't agree with it. This is one I have a lot of trouble with.
I'm fine with relevant ads, but I think they should be relevant based on the context around them, not on the viewer. If I go to a website about trout fishing, show me ads that would be useful to a trout fisherman. There is no need to track anyone to do that.
A lot of this stuff is being purchased with debt. People aren’t happy about their debt, their inability to buy a house, or all the clutter that consumes their home. Yet, in the moment, they are led to believe that a Labubu is what they really desire. It’s not.
It's easier to trick someone into thinking they're receiving value from you, than to actually provide that value.
But I've had this argument before, so I know the reply will be that value is defined as the feeling of receiving value, therefore they are delivering real value.
They think the system is thinking "ohh! I bet X will like this pair of shoes! And this is a great deal on them!" when in fact a more accurate model is "Who is willing to pay the most to put a message in front of someone with the following detailed list of characteristics?" and then people bid for the right to manipulate you, so even if 2 companies are trying to sell you the exact same thing that you do want, the one that thinks they can extract more from you will pay more and win the spot.
What I ended up doing is setting up two separate wifi networks, one with the pihole DNS server and one without it. So she can opt to turn it on.
But yeah overall I agree with you, the ads skew the research by whoever is paying the most for marketing BUT they also work as a filter so you only see stuff that people actually spend money to market on. For _some_ types of products the "barrier to entry" in the ad space can guarantee a certain level of quality (or at least reduce the change for scams).
Profit driven targeted content of any kind, especially ads, are poison. I could never knowingly enable anyone in my household to harm themselves with something so toxic to brain health and quality of life.
In terms of things I want far away from my home and family, surveillance capitalism driven technology ranks up there with meth.
But yeah I tend to agree with you, the companies/products paying for the ads are not necessarily the best ones to buy from.
I have always associated online ads with people who are trying to scam me. Like the giant “download” button ads on sites hosting actual software downloads. Decades of dealing with this kind of thing has led to a deep distrust of all online advertising, to the point where I pay for Kagi to not only not have ads in my search engine, but not even support the business model of using ads to fund a website.
I see people get scammed all the time from ads. It’s an easy way for the scammers to funnel users to their site. Most people I know have tried buying something based on a Facebook ad, from some random Shopify site, and never got their purchase.
These tracking system: it’s just stalking, but done on such a massive scale that, unfortunately, law enforcement and politicians don’t see it that way.
I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information. If no-one is making any money off of it, you'll be left with largely relevant information.
The internet today is like a free to air television network, but I remember a time when it was nothing like that.
Just a gut feeling, but I doubt it. You'll still get a lot of bullshit inaccurate/misleading information, just only pushed by those with the budgets to keep pushing it.
Right-wing podcasters that take money from the Russian government to spread disinformation[0] will still get their checks even if their supplement sponsorships get outlawed.
You can take away all of Alex Jones' money and he'll still find some way to put his nonsense out there.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-ind...
I think most sensible people are quite competent at ignoring the bullshit, so I would love it if there was less bullshit to wade through to get to the nuggets of useful information which are out there. For those too stupid to look past misleading information, there's no helping them anyway.
Generally the most useful information on the web is freely given. Turns out actual experts frequently like nerding out about their thing and trying to get other people interested in it/to understand some facet of it.
There is a prevailing attitude amongst some that they aren't willing to pay for any info - and they hold that as basically some sort of weird sacred belief. I think those people, even if they came across the best piece of content ever written, would be unwilling to pay 10c for it (pre or post). I'm just saying I find that odd.
I've also already got dozens of hardcover books that I'll probably never even get through as it is. Mostly acquired from thrift stores while I was in university.
Then there's the classics. It'd take years to get through just the very best highlights of the public domain literature, religious texts, and philosophy. Project Gutenberg has 75,000 books. My wife spent at least months (maybe years? I don't remember) just reading Proust (at the end she said it wasn't worth it).
This is without even needing to get into the fact that frankly I don't see copyright on things older than me or especially older than my parents as valid at this point. Most modern works I'd be interested in qualifies for that treatment. The authors are retired or dead.
This is all also speaking to pure consumerism as ways to pass idle time. I've got instruments to play, a computer to program/tinker with, an endless list of possible home improvements, and a family to spend time with.
I don't think I'm the only one who ends up in this state. There's a whole meme about people having hundreds of games in their steam backlog.
The best piece of content ever written is just not a compelling hook. Nothing in the content industry is. First of all it's an entirely generic description: the best X ever written is not going to be described as "content". That's like calling it "copy", and immediately betrays its low value/the way the author thinks of it.
So yeah generic "content" is going to be a very hard if not impossible sell.
Picking on my use of the word content is a bit silly. I think you know what I meant. Use whatever word you want there - best book, best textbook, whatever.
Another observation though is that he literally describes his own site as having a "content business model" and his own posts as "content", so I think the word choice is more telling than you realize. I see it and just think "ok..." and hit back. I guess it pays his bills though so it seems to work. Apparently someone's giving him the $0.10. Other people in the content industry looking for tips like some giant ouroboros?
You might quibble that you would only pay for a physical book or whatever. I say why? Are you paying for the content (that word again) of that book or the paper? I'd argue the former. So why does it really matter if it was online or not? In the future it seems reasonably likely that there will be a higher proportion of the best writing online vs in books. Sure, a lot may be willing to write for free, but do you think it absolutely impossible that some percentage of them charge?
So I suppose no, I can't think of any content I've thought to pay for recently, and have trouble picturing what I would pay for going forward. I already don't even take the time to read all of the writings of nobel laureates, fields medalists, etc. when they're already giving it to me for free. Not just old works but current blogs. There's more than a lifetime of the best works out there from world renowned experts. Thousands of years of the very best writing and I can't be bothered. And that's just writing. The list of things to occupy my time is endless. Acquiring something to read/watch is just not a problem I have. It doesn't make sense to pay for more. I have too much of it.
The content industry is competing with the entirety of recorded human history even before gen ai. A nearly impossible task unless someone destroys it all out of spite.
And if I'm actually reading instead of working, isn't the time I spend more of a debt than a declaration that I want to donate as much money as I wasted by not working for X minutes?
Employers haven't paid me for spending a lot of time with them so far.
But let's stick with the argument and claim that our time is worth the hourly rate of whoever creates what we consume. That also doesn't make sense, no matter how charitably I view it, for media.
Even if I want to live in a radically equal society where everyone's time is worth the same amount of money, it would only make sense when trading 1:1 - for example, I can compare my hourly rate to that of my barber, if I pretend there are no corporations, no taxes etc.
But yeah, to be brief, no, it doesn't make sense to give all of your time a monterary value. And when it comes to non-working time, I even find it to be a deeply gross way of thinking. Not regarding the willingness to pay, it's fair to think about your own income and how other workers have to make ends meet and to put it into perspective.
I also never said anything about equality or that an engineer or a scientists time is necessarily worth the same as other occupations. I was pointing to a very large disparity (paying a very small amount for content that one clearly values, if they value their time). You can put whatever numbers you want in my original comment and my point would stand.
Sure, I could pay for Hackernews or Github or whatever else (these may be bad examples due to the lack of ads) but lets even say the blogpost linked above.
If I could easily send 0.20$ to someone instantly, without much thought, I would.
I was hoping cryptocurrency would solve this, although the complexity and immense fees with most networks really rule that out.
There is plenty of stuff online which is worth the money, just YouTube premium alone is a great bargain with the highest quality content conceivable inside. Or if you prefer empirical evidence, millions of people pay for Spotify.