8 ms·

Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear tha

Any time a site asks me to disable tracking protection, it has the curious effect of reinforcing my desire to leave it enabled - that site has made it clear that they are intentionally and unapologetically violating my privacy for a quick buck.

_jal 8y ago
Personally, I appreciate the courtesy of them being up front. I'm happy to go elsewhere, and they save me the trouble of making sure my somewhat Rube Goldbergian-collection of privacy measures aren't acting up. Win-win!
johnnylambada 8y ago
the problem with this line of thinking is that newspaper people need to actually make a buck. Or else there are no newspapers.
- rhizome 8y ago
  So sell regular old display ads. Native ads are the future (again).
  - x0x0 8y ago
    Not anymore. There's very low demand / price for run-of-site dispñay ads.
    - gordaco 8y ago
      Then let's increase the demand by diminishing the ROI of the current ad model. Something that can be done, for example, by using an ad blocker and never ever turning it off.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      Are you saying that if WaPo started selling only native ads nobody would buy them? I'm skeptical of that prediction.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Maybe the newspapers entire value is tied to a fraction of the staff and they wonder why we are all collectively disinterested in funding their worthless printing presses, managers, secretaries, and buildings?
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    Maybe so, but this discussion usually conflates four sentiments: 1. I do/don't think the content is worth the subscription. 2. I do/don't think advertising should be used to support the business. 3. I have issues with the privacy implications of advertising. 4. I don't want to pay but I also don't want to deal with ads. Though maybe you're expressing a fifth? "I don't see why they need to spend this much money to make this content."
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      I read a broad selection of content and don't necessarily know ahead of time which publications are going to produce the useful/interesting content this month. I cannot afford to support dozens of publications which still might not include all the content I want to read because article foo is from yet a different publication. Guessing ahead of time seems both broken and expensive compared to grazing one a continuous stream of interesting data supported by ads consumed by people too stupid to install adblocking. In theory modest advertising could probably easily pay for the people that actually produce the content, In theory micropayments might work too. In reality they insist on wasting most of the money they earn and deploying intrusive ads and bullying to try to make me subscribe so they can keep wasting money. My choices are to either give them a big middle finger or surrender my computer to their nonsense and prop up their poorly thought out business model. As adblockers become increasingly prevalent and decreasing numbers pay for subscriptions this will obviously be increasingly difficult for content creators but solving their problems isn't my problem. Since I only control my computer I will just keep doing whats best for me.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    You mean the institutional infrastructure that allows journalists to do their jobs with some measure of job security and editorial integrity? (not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)
- _jal 8y ago
  I agree that news outlets serve an important function. That's exactly why it is especially disheartening to see them turn into organs of surveillance capitalism. Regardless, if you attempt to extort me with a choice between privacy or an uninformed populace, I'll happily share my view on where exactly you can stick that and spin. There are decent media outlets doing good work out there who can report and respect their readers at the same time [1]. I frankly don't care if the papers who can't figure out how to function without selling out their customers fail. Let their corpses be a cautionary tale. [1] One outlet I subscribe to, Talkingpointsmemo.com, is in the process of offering ad-free options. I blocked them previously, and they've made no effort to break the site in the presence of blockers.
  - mdex 8y ago
    Has reading national news or keeping up with politics ever benefit you in a real life scenario? If so, in what way? Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?
    - unit91 8y ago
      Agree with you mostly, though on occasion it's nice to know if my taxes are increasing or decreasing soon, and where most people in my country stand on "Merry Christmas" vs "season's greetings" (whatever that means).
    - _jal 8y ago
      It has saved my life once, via weather report. It has let me know that there was a disaster in the area where I knew people I cared about greatly were, enabling me to prep some support. And once, it told me that a project my then-company was working on was indirectly doomed by the advent of this little thing called the iPhone. Off the top of my head. I think Chomsky is fairly correct, but a bit blinkered. Your turn: How to you think Manufacturing Consent applies to message boards like this? Does that tell you anything about human behaviour, whether or not mediated by institutional imperative?
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  There are a countless ways of funding news. The reason for the current obsession with invasive tracking and advertising to offer "free" access is because it's seen as most profitable. Make it not profitable and newspapers don't go away - the profit model changes.
- tajen 8y ago
  Nonono, the “otherwise there are no newspapers” is not an excuse. Let’s analyze the right-wing. They’ve been let down by the press (literally 95% donations of journalists went to Hillary during the 2016 campaign), so they’ve built an entire parallel world of reporters. The right-wing reporting is comprised of individuals, who make 5-to-60-minutes analyses of, say, the lies of the wage gap or the newsbending of CNN, put it up on Youtube, and collect funding via Patreon. We don’t have nice cameras but we’re efficient enough that we can win an election. We don’t necessarily have to fund the huge assets of legacy journalism. If a journal’s costs soared high and quality was altered by entrenched political opinions of their teachers, we can let it die. The press and TV are typically medias that made themselves irrelevant by forcing an analysis on the reader, leaving the “reporting” or “unbiased reporting” some 20 years behind, and they’ve entrenched enough that there are no right-wing journalists anymore in the sector. Given the political realignment of the population that’s occurring, the sector will die off together with the sponsor party. Journalism is now so tied to an outdated way of life and a political opinion that a new form of reporting and new sectors will appear, and the TV/press form will die.
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  The problem is that newspapers are leaving money on the table. I'd sign up for a Netflix style subscription service that offers me access to a broad range of media. I have a Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Spotify subscriptions as I'm sure many here do. That's good value for money. Netflix is making way more than I ever spent on dvds & cinema visits combined. Same for Spotify. As it is, all I have is paywalled niche news sites each thinking they can charge similar fees for very limited access to just they tiny corner of the market. I'm not going to pay per article. I haven't bought a news paper in years. I get all my news through ad sponsored crappy websites. Because they are so offensively bad, I have adblocking, tracking prevention, and other extensions trying to limit my exposure. Works great for me So, that's money not spent by me or millions of other users that news papers are neglecting to make.
ryan-allen 8y ago
For me, most often I disable ad blocking for the site, so we have the opposite reaction!
gwbas1c 8y ago
The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  Ads and tracking are honestly just fine and a perfectly good compromise. Fears over them are greatly exaggerated.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Except for the incredibly low quality ads that also make the article unreadable. The entire internet ad industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars and countless petabytes of analytics still suck at ads. The ad quality is complete garbage across the board.
  - mdex 8y ago
    There's the overall creepiness of hordes of data containing your entire online history being used for the sole purpose of predicting what you'll buy and manipulating you into buying it. But I think there's more to it than that: It's customary in trade to not have hidden costs or unintended consequences of using your product, anything otherwise is dishonest. And insisting a product is "free" while having hidden schemes to extract value from customers is scam-y. Then to say ad-hoc that its a "fair compromise"... but if it was a "good deal" why not be upfront about it, why try to hide it? "You should've read the EULA." Well, a bet a bunch of people being targeted/tracked by Google & Facebook are children, many too young to consent, some maybe even too young to even read...
- davidgh 8y ago
  Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read. Also let me share my account with a few members of my household on a “family plan”. They would make a lot more off me than they do from ads, and I’d be a lot happier.
newsbinator 8y ago
It's like a grocery store employee sidling up while you wait in line at the checkout, and politely asking you to put away your phone so you can examine the impulse-buy items on the racks around the checkout. They remind you that having a good grocery store in your neighborhood is important, and don't you want to support that?
- rebuilder 8y ago
  More like the clerk asking you to please take your hat and sunglasses off so their CCTV facial recognition system can identify you and keep track of your movements in the store.
  - adtac 8y ago
    So WP is afraid I'll shoplift articles? Because the purpose of CCTV cameras is security, not marketing.
    - brennebeck 8y ago
      I think the gp’s point was an analogy, not actually what is being used.
      - tunap 8y ago
        Better analogy: Please disable your data & use our "free wifi" to better triangulate your movements, download the contents of your contacts, emails, texts, browser history and while we're at it, drop a tracking app/cookie/x on your phone, etc....
        brennebeck 8y ago
        Yup, I agree there are other, more accurate representations possible. I just wanted to clarify what seemed to be conveyed by op, as there appeared be a misunderstanding based on the reply. Thanks for the additional example.
    - 8y ago
russdpale 8y ago
I agree, I always leave those sites and never return.

_jal 8y ago

Personally, I appreciate the courtesy of them being up front. I'm happy to go elsewhere, and they save me the trouble of making sure my somewhat Rube Goldbergian-collection of privacy measures aren't acting up. Win-win!

johnnylambada 8y ago

the problem with this line of thinking is that newspaper people need to actually make a buck. Or else there are no newspapers.

rhizome 8y ago
So sell regular old display ads. Native ads are the future (again).
- x0x0 8y ago
  Not anymore. There's very low demand / price for run-of-site dispñay ads.
  - gordaco 8y ago
    Then let's increase the demand by diminishing the ROI of the current ad model. Something that can be done, for example, by using an ad blocker and never ever turning it off.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Are you saying that if WaPo started selling only native ads nobody would buy them? I'm skeptical of that prediction.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Maybe the newspapers entire value is tied to a fraction of the staff and they wonder why we are all collectively disinterested in funding their worthless printing presses, managers, secretaries, and buildings?
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Maybe so, but this discussion usually conflates four sentiments: 1. I do/don't think the content is worth the subscription. 2. I do/don't think advertising should be used to support the business. 3. I have issues with the privacy implications of advertising. 4. I don't want to pay but I also don't want to deal with ads. Though maybe you're expressing a fifth? "I don't see why they need to spend this much money to make this content."
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    I read a broad selection of content and don't necessarily know ahead of time which publications are going to produce the useful/interesting content this month. I cannot afford to support dozens of publications which still might not include all the content I want to read because article foo is from yet a different publication. Guessing ahead of time seems both broken and expensive compared to grazing one a continuous stream of interesting data supported by ads consumed by people too stupid to install adblocking. In theory modest advertising could probably easily pay for the people that actually produce the content, In theory micropayments might work too. In reality they insist on wasting most of the money they earn and deploying intrusive ads and bullying to try to make me subscribe so they can keep wasting money. My choices are to either give them a big middle finger or surrender my computer to their nonsense and prop up their poorly thought out business model. As adblockers become increasingly prevalent and decreasing numbers pay for subscriptions this will obviously be increasingly difficult for content creators but solving their problems isn't my problem. Since I only control my computer I will just keep doing whats best for me.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  You mean the institutional infrastructure that allows journalists to do their jobs with some measure of job security and editorial integrity? (not that there's a whole lot of that left... but its still better than getting news from facebook and youtube vloggers)
_jal 8y ago
I agree that news outlets serve an important function. That's exactly why it is especially disheartening to see them turn into organs of surveillance capitalism. Regardless, if you attempt to extort me with a choice between privacy or an uninformed populace, I'll happily share my view on where exactly you can stick that and spin. There are decent media outlets doing good work out there who can report and respect their readers at the same time [1]. I frankly don't care if the papers who can't figure out how to function without selling out their customers fail. Let their corpses be a cautionary tale. [1] One outlet I subscribe to, Talkingpointsmemo.com, is in the process of offering ad-free options. I blocked them previously, and they've made no effort to break the site in the presence of blockers.
- mdex 8y ago
  Has reading national news or keeping up with politics ever benefit you in a real life scenario? If so, in what way? Also, what do you think of Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent'?
  - unit91 8y ago
    Agree with you mostly, though on occasion it's nice to know if my taxes are increasing or decreasing soon, and where most people in my country stand on "Merry Christmas" vs "season's greetings" (whatever that means).
  - _jal 8y ago
    It has saved my life once, via weather report. It has let me know that there was a disaster in the area where I knew people I cared about greatly were, enabling me to prep some support. And once, it told me that a project my then-company was working on was indirectly doomed by the advent of this little thing called the iPhone. Off the top of my head. I think Chomsky is fairly correct, but a bit blinkered. Your turn: How to you think Manufacturing Consent applies to message boards like this? Does that tell you anything about human behaviour, whether or not mediated by institutional imperative?
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There are a countless ways of funding news. The reason for the current obsession with invasive tracking and advertising to offer "free" access is because it's seen as most profitable. Make it not profitable and newspapers don't go away - the profit model changes.
tajen 8y ago
Nonono, the “otherwise there are no newspapers” is not an excuse. Let’s analyze the right-wing. They’ve been let down by the press (literally 95% donations of journalists went to Hillary during the 2016 campaign), so they’ve built an entire parallel world of reporters. The right-wing reporting is comprised of individuals, who make 5-to-60-minutes analyses of, say, the lies of the wage gap or the newsbending of CNN, put it up on Youtube, and collect funding via Patreon. We don’t have nice cameras but we’re efficient enough that we can win an election. We don’t necessarily have to fund the huge assets of legacy journalism. If a journal’s costs soared high and quality was altered by entrenched political opinions of their teachers, we can let it die. The press and TV are typically medias that made themselves irrelevant by forcing an analysis on the reader, leaving the “reporting” or “unbiased reporting” some 20 years behind, and they’ve entrenched enough that there are no right-wing journalists anymore in the sector. Given the political realignment of the population that’s occurring, the sector will die off together with the sponsor party. Journalism is now so tied to an outdated way of life and a political opinion that a new form of reporting and new sectors will appear, and the TV/press form will die.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
The problem is that newspapers are leaving money on the table. I'd sign up for a Netflix style subscription service that offers me access to a broad range of media. I have a Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Spotify subscriptions as I'm sure many here do. That's good value for money. Netflix is making way more than I ever spent on dvds & cinema visits combined. Same for Spotify. As it is, all I have is paywalled niche news sites each thinking they can charge similar fees for very limited access to just they tiny corner of the market. I'm not going to pay per article. I haven't bought a news paper in years. I get all my news through ad sponsored crappy websites. Because they are so offensively bad, I have adblocking, tracking prevention, and other extensions trying to limit my exposure. Works great for me So, that's money not spent by me or millions of other users that news papers are neglecting to make.

ryan-allen 8y ago

For me, most often I disable ad blocking for the site, so we have the opposite reaction!

gwbas1c 8y ago

The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

jimmaswell 8y ago
Ads and tracking are honestly just fine and a perfectly good compromise. Fears over them are greatly exaggerated.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Except for the incredibly low quality ads that also make the article unreadable. The entire internet ad industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars and countless petabytes of analytics still suck at ads. The ad quality is complete garbage across the board.
- mdex 8y ago
  There's the overall creepiness of hordes of data containing your entire online history being used for the sole purpose of predicting what you'll buy and manipulating you into buying it. But I think there's more to it than that: It's customary in trade to not have hidden costs or unintended consequences of using your product, anything otherwise is dishonest. And insisting a product is "free" while having hidden schemes to extract value from customers is scam-y. Then to say ad-hoc that its a "fair compromise"... but if it was a "good deal" why not be upfront about it, why try to hide it? "You should've read the EULA." Well, a bet a bunch of people being targeted/tracked by Google & Facebook are children, many too young to consent, some maybe even too young to even read...
davidgh 8y ago
Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read. Also let me share my account with a few members of my household on a “family plan”. They would make a lot more off me than they do from ads, and I’d be a lot happier.

newsbinator 8y ago

It's like a grocery store employee sidling up while you wait in line at the checkout, and politely asking you to put away your phone so you can examine the impulse-buy items on the racks around the checkout. They remind you that having a good grocery store in your neighborhood is important, and don't you want to support that?

rebuilder 8y ago
More like the clerk asking you to please take your hat and sunglasses off so their CCTV facial recognition system can identify you and keep track of your movements in the store.
- adtac 8y ago
  So WP is afraid I'll shoplift articles? Because the purpose of CCTV cameras is security, not marketing.
  - brennebeck 8y ago
    I think the gp’s point was an analogy, not actually what is being used.
    - tunap 8y ago
      Better analogy: Please disable your data & use our "free wifi" to better triangulate your movements, download the contents of your contacts, emails, texts, browser history and while we're at it, drop a tracking app/cookie/x on your phone, etc....
      - brennebeck 8y ago
        Yup, I agree there are other, more accurate representations possible. I just wanted to clarify what seemed to be conveyed by op, as there appeared be a misunderstanding based on the reply. Thanks for the additional example.
  - 8y ago

russdpale 8y ago

I agree, I always leave those sites and never return.