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It's easy (and trendy) to point the blame at web developers and businesses who bloat their webapp with advertisements and trackers, but for many of those busine
by rubicon33 8y ago
It's easy (and trendy) to point the blame at web developers and businesses who bloat their webapp with advertisements and trackers, but for many of those businesses, that's the only way they would make money.
There are many things consumers are willing to pay for with their time and patience, but not their cash. As it turns out many of those things are web "services". If they were truly valuable on the same level as say, food, people would gladly pay cash for the service.
YouTube is a great example for me personally. If you told me I had to pay a monthly subscription of $10, I'd stop watching YouTube instantly. But since it's "free" I'll sit through a few ads. I don't mind paying with my time.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoWithout ads we would just have to teach our friends how to use IRC, FTP and rsync.
- coldtea 8y agoThat, and we wouldn't have content, so we'd also have to teach them hand shadow puppetry for entertainment...
- jazzyjackson 8y agoI'm still on board xD Plenty of people still write travel blogs and think pieces without getting a salary for it. The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad.
- coldtea 8y ago>The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad. It's free to produce -- but it costs to run a huge network of Twitter scale to post it
- everdrive 8y agoYour point is taken, and I agree that very many folks are not being reasonable about what they want. The money has to come from somewhere. That said, I think I'd be perfectly happy if most websites went under. What we're getting out of it (novelty, entertainment) isn't worth the cost (attention span, loss of privacy) in most cases.