Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:

> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.

But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.

But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.

I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.

This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.

I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.

Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.

A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.

Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.

Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.

We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.

I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).

> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable

I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist.

It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

People consistenty act like they have no agency.

" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..."

It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.

So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".

> So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".

lol This is a wild sentiment to not only have, but to share with others.

Just in shock someone actually believe this. That you're so entitled to other people's stuff that unless they give it to you for free they shouldn't be doing it.

> It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture.

lol What? You're just making things up.

>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.

> It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone

It is entitlement. Nobody forced you to visit a web site with ads. The thing I said about people pretending they have no agency is exactly what you're implying.

Thinking you deserve free stuff because you don't like how it's presented is nothing but entitlement. If someone has to pay for your traffic, it's theft. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to come to terms with this. Maybe it's because everyone wants to believe their altruistic and this challenges it.

What's worse is seeing the same people who claim LLMs are stealing but have no issue with ad blockers. That level of incoherence is nuts to me.

People who serve ads never ask whether the user whether they wish their computer hardware to be utilized for advertising. They just use it. Ads are 100% predisposed on trespassing. Your average ad supported site wants discoverability by being free, then when the hosting costs bite, hope the end user conveniently forgets that they (the end user) have ultimate sovereignty over what code the hoster hosts they (the end user) desires to run on the end user's own hardware. You (the hoster) don't have a right to eyeball monetization. Old school Internet before SEO & mercantilization worked this way just fine.

LLM companies never asked to train on scraped content when they damn well intended to rent the result back commercially.

There is no incoherence here unless you accept axiomatically the Internet should make money. That was never the original purpose. Nor should that become it's ultimate purpose. In fact, I argue that this goes beyond the purpose of the Internet. Society is not yours to monetize. Period. Commercial relationships are not default.

For the last 30+ years, I've watched as society has completely forgotten how to be humans talking to humans and building relationships in lieu of trying to discover the fastest way to plug into someone else's wallet by selling something that isn't theirs to sell.

> People who serve ads never ask whether the user whether they wish their computer hardware to be utilized for advertising.

People who serve ads don't force you to visit their site. You do this on your own free will.

You're not a victim. You don't deserve other people's stuff for free because one site has deceptive practices. It's such an immature worldview.

The relationship between People and Sites you're describing isn't as one-sided as you think.

A website wants visitors as much as a visitor wants to see the content of the website. If a website exists but doesn't get read, what is the point of it?

Personally, I would take readers using adblockers over no readers at all, the same way I'd want people reading a newsletter even if I had to print and pay for it myself.

Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous

They're inconvenient but physical banks still exist

How so? I have 1 bank account with a local credit union and I have never logged into any of the online stuff. What do you take issue with, specifically?

You certainly can. My parents don't use online banking or even ATMs.

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