The problem is publishers assuming I care about this. That they're actually indispensable to the ecosystem, rather then what they are - a passing interest who's absence I wouldn't notice or care about.
Thanks for getting to the point I wanted. Then I guess ads on these sites don’t matter, as they are so pointless, you’re not Visiting these sites.
However, you still do, so they have value. That value comes at a price, rather you think they are good or not good for the ego system. You’re actions speak in the camp of them being good.
I think we can all agree, some porn and content is not good. However, the value walks with out attention And not our moral desires.
Through out this thread I’ve seen people say they have no respect for Facebook or google and their ads, yet services they use daily. Unwilling to pay, the product is you.
Either pay with your money or lack of attention and this seems like it’s no longer a problem. M
The issue is, we want all this but want to provide them with little or not compensation for their value.
We use to speak with our attention, we didn’t like this store, so we never went there. Today, this extension is merely still going to the store, but ignoring what we dislike.
There’s no debate. I use ad supported services (like Facebook) and I block ads. End of story. If these services go away because of some ad revenue problem (unlikely) I just don’t care. Right now there is no ad supported service that I believe I would pay anything for other than google search itself. I don’t have to right now so the issue is moot. I had a pretty rich life before Facebook and MySpace, somehow I’ll survive and I think I speak for a sizable chunk of people. Some people might value fb enough to pay for it like compuserve in the 80s. Good on them.
I can possibly see how these issues might matter to you if you make a living at google or a large content company, but I, like the vast majority of people do not. It is not my concern. I don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
I currently host my own email, at, if I only used the servers for email, considerable cost both in rent and time.
I wouldn't use Gmail, but I'd probably consider Fastmail if/when I don't want to host my own email anymore.
I might use Dropbox over Google drive (rather than store stuff on my server), and I might use Neocities.org to host a static Web site.
So there are many ad supported services that live next to "for pay" equivalent services.
As for content, I used to subscribe to lwn.net - but stopped when I realised I wasn't reading it closely enough to warrant the subscription. I might come back at a later date.
I'd love to see a site like like lwn that syndicated news; a clean look, perhaps with ads/delayed publishing to non-subscribers, the "subscription link"-system (i could share what I read with non-subscribers). And with proper compensation for conrmtributers (individuals and institutions).
You've crossed into violating the site guidelines here. We're trying to avoid this kind of flamewar, and ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so if you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Unless I'm missing something from the context, the comment broke at least three: the one against calling names in arguments (e.g. "leech"), the guideline about civility (by going into personal attack), and this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
I'm sorry but that is splitting hairs. The comment used a name but it was not name calling, it was the core of his argument. He was being relatively civil, it's clear from the comment. And are you really going to delete someone's comment because you think it's engaging in a straw man argument? Can't the other commenter defend himself?
Sorry I think you sometimes get too heavy handed around here.
Especially not newspapers. Not only their information often isn’t balanced, it is sometimes so much propaganda filled with verifiable false facts (e.g. on the wage gap) that I wish they would disappear. I mostly use them only to take snapshots and build videos about how the press publishes false information or correct information worded in such a way that the reader gets the wrong idea.
I would pay for Youtube. Or rather, for good youtubers. In fact, I donate using Patreon on a monthly basis to a few youtubers who provide accurate news. QED...
No wonder they are dubbed as “Washington Compost” or “Confabulated News Network”. And same for any social network (Twitter, Facebook and Youtube) who censor right-wing informtion, not only I don’t care about their ad revenue, but if they disappeared because of this, it would be a net win for society. Neither newspapers nor social networks will disappear, unfortunately.
We've had adblockers for fifteen years. It was reasonable to speculate that they might kill online publishing in the early 2010s maybe. But now?
Print doesn't have easy adblocking, it's just you and a pair of scissors. Which is stronger, print or web publishing?
How many years of adblockers not destroying the internet should we see before it's reasonable to reevaluate our initial assumptions about their impact?
There are hundreds of articles for any topic on the internet. Even if 10% of them could survive without ads it would more than enough. The problem is right now there is no way to distinguish between them without visiting them all. And I am not going to open and close 5 websites before I could finally find the one without ads.
Website owners could easily fix that problem by declaring some standard mandatory component of URL for every ad-supported page. I would happily write and use an extension that would erase all links that have e.g. string "/ads/" in them. That way I would never visit there part of the internet and wouldn't harm them in any way. However since they don't want to make this small step towards my needs they are welcome to go to hell.
Most of internet media just isn't good enough.