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Why is it a “problem”? Outlawing ads seems hugely regressive for society as a whole. Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who

by donatj 7y ago

Why is it a “problem”? Outlawing ads seems hugely regressive for society as a whole. Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.

lameiam 7y ago
If there are ads, then the content is not free.
- donatj 7y ago
  I am given valuable content and did not give money. For all reasonalble intents and purposes it’s free. For as far as any person without means cares, it is free.
  - n0rbwah 7y ago
    You give them some of your brain time which they're reselling to the highest bidder.
    - matz1 7y ago
      Which is not money, thus its free.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      You either use that brain time to generate income at work and then hand over that money, or use it in real-time to pay for the content. Ads are much faster and easier in that regard.
  - dordoka 7y ago
    It might be free as in gratis (free beer), but it's not free at all. Your behaviour, your profile, your data: you are the one giving that away in exchange. That data of yours is valuable.
    - tapland 7y ago
      It isn't free as in speech without ads either. You give up your behavior, profile, data no matter the site showing ads or not. What you wrote sounds like a pro-ad argument when thought about for a second.
      - dordoka 7y ago
        I agree with your first two sentences, not the last one though. I didn't even mention ads in my comment :)
    - FreedomFreedom 7y ago
      And IMHO even more importantly, with advertising the dynamic between content provider and user completely changes. The user no longer primarily is a customer, but rather becomes the product for the advertisers. The content provider no longer only has to cater to the user, but also to the advertiser, with the conflicts of interest that can bring (e.g. unpopularity of critical product reviews). Restricting the legality of advertisements in general might have the nice effect of leveling the playing field, by making it harder for content providers to benefit by-generally covertly-selling out their users (or their users' interests) to such third parties.
DJHenk 7y ago
> Without ads there would be basically no free content online Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward. > Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines. Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- donatj 7y ago
  Firstly, I honestly don’t believe citation is needed on “people don’t work for free”. We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers. Yes there would be hobbyist information for free, but WebMD? News sites in general? Any sort of resource that takes money to pay people to maintain? It will all be pay gated. As someone who does not use an adblocker, I have genuinely no problems finding the content I’m looking for.
  - Iv 7y ago
    > We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers. See? They found a way to put content online without relying on ads.
- dallasrpi 7y ago
  People can't make content for free on Youtube and Instagram without those platforms existing because of ads.
normalnorm 7y ago
> Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. There was plenty of free content online before ads, in fact I claim that the web was better before ads arrived, and it is getting worse by the day. Marketeers ruined it. It happens over and over. YouTube had plenty of great content for free before monetization. Now it is becoming worse by the day, because everything is ad-related. "Influencers", etc. > Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age. Easy access to information is a consequence of the Internet and then the Web, both technologies having been developed by government-funded programs, respectively in the US and in the EU. Ads brought us re-centraliztion, targeting and erosion of democracy through extreme polarization and fake news. I know this is hard to believe for a lot of people here, but human beings are motivated by many things other than monetary profit.
- manigandham 7y ago
  No there wasn't. The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads. This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
  - normalnorm 7y ago
    > No there wasn't. Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself. > The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads. Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible. > This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is. There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.
Blaiz0r 7y ago
The dark age was the best age.
Iv 7y ago
The most important and informative website on the internet, Wikipedia, is free of advertisements. Before Youtube, we were sharing files directly. There was far more content online!

by donatj 7y ago

lameiam 7y ago

If there are ads, then the content is not free.

donatj 7y ago
I am given valuable content and did not give money. For all reasonalble intents and purposes it’s free. For as far as any person without means cares, it is free.
- n0rbwah 7y ago
  You give them some of your brain time which they're reselling to the highest bidder.
  - matz1 7y ago
    Which is not money, thus its free.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    You either use that brain time to generate income at work and then hand over that money, or use it in real-time to pay for the content. Ads are much faster and easier in that regard.
- dordoka 7y ago
  It might be free as in gratis (free beer), but it's not free at all. Your behaviour, your profile, your data: you are the one giving that away in exchange. That data of yours is valuable.
  - tapland 7y ago
    It isn't free as in speech without ads either. You give up your behavior, profile, data no matter the site showing ads or not. What you wrote sounds like a pro-ad argument when thought about for a second.
    - dordoka 7y ago
      I agree with your first two sentences, not the last one though. I didn't even mention ads in my comment :)
  - FreedomFreedom 7y ago
    And IMHO even more importantly, with advertising the dynamic between content provider and user completely changes. The user no longer primarily is a customer, but rather becomes the product for the advertisers. The content provider no longer only has to cater to the user, but also to the advertiser, with the conflicts of interest that can bring (e.g. unpopularity of critical product reviews). Restricting the legality of advertisements in general might have the nice effect of leveling the playing field, by making it harder for content providers to benefit by-generally covertly-selling out their users (or their users' interests) to such third parties.

DJHenk 7y ago

> Without ads there would be basically no free content online Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward. > Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines. Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
donatj 7y ago
Firstly, I honestly don’t believe citation is needed on “people don’t work for free”. We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers. Yes there would be hobbyist information for free, but WebMD? News sites in general? Any sort of resource that takes money to pay people to maintain? It will all be pay gated. As someone who does not use an adblocker, I have genuinely no problems finding the content I’m looking for.
- Iv 7y ago
  > We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers. See? They found a way to put content online without relying on ads.
dallasrpi 7y ago
People can't make content for free on Youtube and Instagram without those platforms existing because of ads.

normalnorm 7y ago

> Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. There was plenty of free content online before ads, in fact I claim that the web was better before ads arrived, and it is getting worse by the day. Marketeers ruined it. It happens over and over. YouTube had plenty of great content for free before monetization. Now it is becoming worse by the day, because everything is ad-related. "Influencers", etc. > Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age. Easy access to information is a consequence of the Internet and then the Web, both technologies having been developed by government-funded programs, respectively in the US and in the EU. Ads brought us re-centraliztion, targeting and erosion of democracy through extreme polarization and fake news. I know this is hard to believe for a lot of people here, but human beings are motivated by many things other than monetary profit.

manigandham 7y ago
No there wasn't. The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads. This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
- normalnorm 7y ago
  > No there wasn't. Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself. > The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads. Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible. > This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is. There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.

Blaiz0r 7y ago

The dark age was the best age.

Iv 7y ago

The most important and informative website on the internet, Wikipedia, is free of advertisements. Before Youtube, we were sharing files directly. There was far more content online!