Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that the point you're replying to is ridiculous, but I still think there's no moral imperative. An equivalent moral case is broadcast TV ads. You aren't obligated to stay in the room and pay attention; going to the kitchen, using Tivo, and flipping channels are all morally ok.

Part of the reason that subscriptions and micropayments haven't caught on is that people put up with ads. If ads stop working as a business model, I doubt we'll be looking at a bleak future of watching Love Boat reruns and rereading old Family Circle articles. We will find some other way of funding good content.

Indeed, when I look at the way the quality of television has improved over the last couple of decades, I think it's a reasonable argument that blocking ads would be the moral imperative. As anybody who has worked in ad-supported industries knows, consumers aren't the customers, they're the product. Rather than being served, viewers and readers are being served up to advertisers. The system has a conflict of interest at the heart of it. It's reasonable to refuse to support corrupt systems.

OTOH, the alternative to ad-supported content is paying directly for the content you want to read, which is even worse from a privacy POV because publishers will know exactly who you are instead of only knowing which "demographic" you belong to.

Paying directly changes the relationship significantly - a business is generally going to pay attention to their customers that produce their revenue than the "free" accounts that are the merely the product being sold to advertisers.

The Onion was right[1]. In the rush to sell out their "users" to to whomever is willing to pay, a lot of people seem to have come to believe that advertising is the only way to the internet can work.

The internet enabled many new ways of publishing due it removing most of the per-transaction costs. I suspect we haven't even seen most of these methods. While "Kickstarter" style funding and Wikipedia's "public television style" requests for donations, while interesting experiments, are only the first generation of what is enabled by the internet.

Unfortunately, untested and unproven (by somebody else) ideas do imply some amount of risk, which scares a lot of people back into the traditional method where the advertisers get to paint over everything.

edit: forgot URL

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o

Every neighborhood store I shop in knows who I am, and that's fine. Ditto every single online store. The problem with publishers knowing who I am is only problematic if they are also selling me out to advertisers. The easy fix for this is for them not to take advertising. Places like Consumer Reports and Cooks Illustrated do just fine that way.

Unless payment goes through some kind of anonymization service.

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