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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care. They care only about revenue numbers. You can walk up to them, show them this article and even this HN thread and their first question will be "how does it affect our revenue?"

They don't see it as money made through ripping off users without their consent - they think they are entitled to that money. Anything that leads to less money in the name of usability, transparency and honesty is just met with a shrug.

To them, the author of the article and the rest of us are just rambling developers who don't understand how businesses work. And they are the gold standard (they think so) for business ethics. So tell me again, do you really think they will do "something" about that?

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>"how does it affect our revenue?"

Simple, you can serve a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads and I and others might turn off adblock to support the publication or you can do what you're doing, I'll keep it on and see no ads at all.

Nobody is turning off ad blockers.

Exactly we don't, and what's worse is that the "content" is getting to the point where we need _content_ blockers.

I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tell you which three games the article was supposed to tell me about.

I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working among internet "authors".

The PS Plus One is a gaming console or something to that effect. “But Henriette,” my grandmother asked, “which AAA titles will be released for Xbox”?

My grandmother is a gamer. But a bit senile. She had her formative gaming years on the XBox, you see. What she actually meant to ask was: which titles for the PS Plus One?

My dad too has been asking me that question. Or he did until he tragically died in a car accident last week.

So which AAA games will be released for PS Plus One soon or soon-ish?

I really had to ponder that question while driving my Tesla Cybertruck to the gas station. Indeed, which games are that? It’s on everyone’s lips or mouth.

Which brings us to this article. You have been wondering the same thing, haven’t you? If so you are in good company, like that of my beloved grandmother and dear departed father.

Sony says that they will reveal which three AAA titles will be released for PS Plus One in the fourth quarter of 2027.

I think we'll be soon at the point where articles are written by asking AI to extend a three point bullet list to 30 pages, and read by asking AI to summarize articles into a three point bullet list.

This drives me nuts. It's been going on for years that a simple "if this, do that" deal is encoded in an overly elaborate 10 minute long YouTube video where at least 9 minutes of it is filler. You know, when you start skimming the comments to see if anyone bothered with summarizing it.

AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.

> Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand.

More writing means more space to shove ads in between every paragraph.

> I recently got hit by an "article"

Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a magazine with the article into your face?

If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to fight this is by paying for good quality content, which is often possible.

Burger King isn't going to improve the quality of their burgers or service by customers complaining. They'll do something when they see customers going somewhere else.

A notification on my phone. I don't know what produced it exactly, but it was probably connected to my google account (sigh!) somehow.

It's something that happens rarely enough for me to not having developed an automatic "aw hell nah, no f-ing way" filter towards it anyway, and I (naively) did click the notification and "got hit" by the article.

Yup, I keep mine enabled at all times. Anytime I've tried selectively disabling them, I get burnt with increasingly intrusive ads. I might be convinced to enable some kind of "ethical ads" filter that only permits ads are known to be unobtrusive and not track, but then you need to trust that whoever maintains that list wont succumb to incentives.

I will never disable mine. I think back to when malware was served from ads on nytimes.com.

If you let your guard down, someone will mess up and let malware through.

Adblockers are security.

I do. I have turned off UBlock Origin at the learnopengl site as well others where the ads are unobtrusive enough to not block the view completely or require several actions on my part to view the contents. It also helps that the content is not "SEO optimised" bullcrap.

Mostly true, but I personally have it turned of for duckduckgo and it shows me some ads with [ad] label. Actually if you wanted to disable ads there, you wouldn't even need an ad blocker, there's toggle in the settings

While I agree with you in general, I am one of the very few people who do it for the small amount of sites I support. This is not a smart decision from the technical point of view but it's been fine so far.

Youtube is doing it though, and more site will follow. I need better AD blockers, but I do not see an easy way to block streaming, WASM and canvas.

I guess the ship sailed a long time ago, but while no one is going to turn off their ad blocker, they could make people not use one in the first place.

And PLENTY of people simply accept the ads everywhere.

How does that affect revenue? Do you have some data?

But it's PC Gamer, most of their stuff is trash, why would anyone pay for it?

I think this is extremely uncharitable and while there may be people this is true for, it is not at all the general case for people with job titles like "brand director" or "editor in chief". In fact I think it's obnoxious to tar specific named people with such a false generalization.

I think it's just they have to make money to pay salaries and don't have any better ideas, or they don't have the power to implement them.

I have worked professionally with those 3 and I can tell you they do care, but they don't make the decisions at Future.

How would you like PC Gamer to pay their staff? Pop the whole thing behind a paywall?

Yes it’s poorly designed and annoying, I don’t ses where you get ‘ripping off’ from. It makes you sound like a rambling developer who doesn’t understand how businesses wor

I know for sure good businesses don't make their users download half a GB worth of data without the user's consent/knowledge (which is what the article states) in the name of "paying their staff". Ironically, they are not even a gaming company and the users aren't exactly downloading a gaming application that justifies the size of the data.

As I say, it’s very sloppy and could be improved. It probably hurts their readership metrics. ‘Don’t unnecessarily annoy your customers’ is a good maxim. But no-one is being ‘ripped off’.

I personally know two of the three people named, and trust me, they are going to be livid about this.

> trust me, they are going to be livid about this.

Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring?

Forgive us for not trusting you on this.

You're not any kind of "us". You are just a single person, like me and everybody else here.

Of course they can be - and probably are - unknowing of some erroneous code in one of their thousands of articles.

[flagged]

How is "them being livid" is gonna help revenue?

> I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care

Prejudicial and cynical, nice.

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