4 ms·

The irony of saying that on a popular site that does neither of those things should be lost on no one.

by Semirhage 8y ago

trimbo 8y ago
This site has employment ads for YC portfolio companies placed into the feed.
- seszett 8y ago
  These ads don't feel intrusive to me.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Better yet, they don't have JS payloads with 0-days attached to them. Nor does HN engage in js miners. I still hate adverts, but at least here its not a malware-fest. I still hate ads as they are parasitic in one of our most important resources: attention.
- colmvp 8y ago
  At least that's relevant and subdued. When I go to certain sites like Vox, I see repeated ads for women's clothing (wtf?, I'm a guy) that makeup around 40% of an article AND clickbait to other sites via Taboola.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    And if they did have better targeted ads by following you across the internet, people would be complaining.
- dang 8y ago
  We also have Launch HNs for YC startups, which are like the job ads in that they get a placement on the front page to begin with. After that they behave like regular threads though.
wand3r 8y ago
To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that others charge for, it makes me wonder where it all ends. Many internet companies have been put out of business by free services offered by the bigger guys. A similar issue is the endless supply of people or businesses willing to take a loss on their product, either because they have VC money, some other revenue source, or because they are just ignorant. Google was able to lose money on YouTube for the better part of a decade, for example. I once had a thriving business buying items at US postal auctions for resale. But the get rich quick bloggers eventually found out about the auctions and then, for years, an endless supply of clueless suckers just kept showing up and paying above MSRP for things like MacBooks and other high end electronics. Ya, they would lose their shirts, and never come back, but there were always fresh meat each month to do the same thing. So most of us that were actually making money previously, had to move on to other things. It seems like this phenomenon could become more proliferated as some of these core internet companies get larger and larger.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future. For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get.... - 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud - 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices - 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite. -Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year. Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
HN is has two parts: 1. Free chitchat 2. Links to content. HN isn't much without the external content.
- wafflebear 8y ago
  To be fair it's the comments that count. HN could randomly generate topics with a markov generator and still retain 80% of the value for me :)
  - kaybe 8y ago
    We could also take turns in inventing titles and then vote on them. Is there any metric for people clicking the external link compared to unique commenters?
always_good 8y ago
I think it's more ironic that your example of a site doing it right is one run by a company with deep pockets that can afford for the site to not print money directly. That's not the future of the internet that I want. In fact, it's terrifying. This misunderstanding is why the internet is gradually becoming more and more centralized. People don't want to pay money and they don't want to see ads. The only sites that can brave that reality are charities, sites that confer other benefits to the organization (like HN), and the few major services that people will pay for (like Netflix). Not much in between, and the sites in between were basically enabled by ads like the collaborative writing forum I grew up on.
zerostar07 8y ago
that wouldn't be the case if YC wasn't paying for it.

The irony of saying that on a popular site that does neither of those things should be lost on no one.

trimbo 8y ago

This site has employment ads for YC portfolio companies placed into the feed.

seszett 8y ago
These ads don't feel intrusive to me.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Better yet, they don't have JS payloads with 0-days attached to them. Nor does HN engage in js miners. I still hate adverts, but at least here its not a malware-fest. I still hate ads as they are parasitic in one of our most important resources: attention.
colmvp 8y ago
At least that's relevant and subdued. When I go to certain sites like Vox, I see repeated ads for women's clothing (wtf?, I'm a guy) that makeup around 40% of an article AND clickbait to other sites via Taboola.
- scarface74 8y ago
  And if they did have better targeted ads by following you across the internet, people would be complaining.
dang 8y ago
We also have Launch HNs for YC startups, which are like the job ads in that they get a placement on the front page to begin with. After that they behave like regular threads though.

wand3r 8y ago

To be fair hn does not operate news as a business but as a cost center that feeds recruitment for talent for both investment and hiring.

jjeaff 8y ago
Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that others charge for, it makes me wonder where it all ends. Many internet companies have been put out of business by free services offered by the bigger guys. A similar issue is the endless supply of people or businesses willing to take a loss on their product, either because they have VC money, some other revenue source, or because they are just ignorant. Google was able to lose money on YouTube for the better part of a decade, for example. I once had a thriving business buying items at US postal auctions for resale. But the get rich quick bloggers eventually found out about the auctions and then, for years, an endless supply of clueless suckers just kept showing up and paying above MSRP for things like MacBooks and other high end electronics. Ya, they would lose their shirts, and never come back, but there were always fresh meat each month to do the same thing. So most of us that were actually making money previously, had to move on to other things. It seems like this phenomenon could become more proliferated as some of these core internet companies get larger and larger.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future. For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get.... - 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud - 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile devices - 1 TB per user plus everything else you get from G Suite. -Amazon Drive is 1TB for $60 a year. Yes I know that Apple isn't aimed at businesses, but the rest are.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

HN is has two parts: 1. Free chitchat 2. Links to content. HN isn't much without the external content.

wafflebear 8y ago
To be fair it's the comments that count. HN could randomly generate topics with a markov generator and still retain 80% of the value for me :)
- kaybe 8y ago
  We could also take turns in inventing titles and then vote on them. Is there any metric for people clicking the external link compared to unique commenters?

always_good 8y ago

I think it's more ironic that your example of a site doing it right is one run by a company with deep pockets that can afford for the site to not print money directly. That's not the future of the internet that I want. In fact, it's terrifying. This misunderstanding is why the internet is gradually becoming more and more centralized. People don't want to pay money and they don't want to see ads. The only sites that can brave that reality are charities, sites that confer other benefits to the organization (like HN), and the few major services that people will pay for (like Netflix). Not much in between, and the sites in between were basically enabled by ads like the collaborative writing forum I grew up on.

zerostar07 8y ago

that wouldn't be the case if YC wasn't paying for it.