15 ms·

I dislike being tracked as much as the next guy, but I often wonder what "our" ideal end-game goal is? By "our" I mean the typical HN crowd that understands bot

• continuational 5y ago
  I'd simply prefer if all services became paid.
  • afavour 5y ago
    It’s undeniable, though, that such a limitation would shut off access for people who can’t afford it. You see it today with newspaper paywalls and the like. I suspect the vast majority of us in HN would have no problem paying for most of these services but I’m not sure how I feel about us making those choices on behalf of those that can’t.
    • diamond_hands 5y ago
      And we wonder why people seem more uninformed than ever...
    • KittenInABox 5y ago
      If its vital enough that everyone must have access, then it should be considered a public utility like water, or something the government should subsidize like food stamps. I'd be happy for my tax dollars to go towards a well-moderated social media platform that everyone can access and by design doesn't do shit like optimize "engagement" or whatever monetizing nonsense current platforms do to try and make a buck.
    • leokennis 5y ago
      How about a model like Wikipedia? It’s free. If you find it useful and can afford it please donate. If not it’s still free. Seems to work out excellent for them.
      • jokethrowaway 5y ago
        Wikipedia relies on a lot of free labor. This can work for something like an encyclopedia or for moderating an online community. It's not a silver bullet.
    • throwamon 5y ago
      This argument just shows how blind people have become to the possibilities. It's not either/or. There should be at the very least an option to pay and not be tracked. Most services offer no such option.
      • bllguo 5y ago
        why should there be an option? is there some kind of moral imperative? At the market there is one way to buy, I don't get to ask for alternatives to paying upfront. This (for lack of a better term) entitlement really puzzles me. In the physical world, if I don't like the terms, I leave and don't do business. But on the internet, when people don't like the terms they flout the rules and consume anyway. edit: I think it would be ideal to have multiple options, I would rather pay directly myself than paying by watching ads. I just have a problem with justifying refusing to pay in the way the business wants, yet still consuming their content.
      • saati 5y ago
        The ones willing to pay are the ones the advertisers want to track, so that won't work.
    • asdff 5y ago
      If its an important service it could be subsidized. You can get past newspaper paywalls with a library card in most cases, people are just lazy and prefer to spend the 20 seconds it takes writing a comment complaining about a paywall rather than the two minutes it takes to find out your library covers these newspapers.
    • BeetleB 5y ago
      > You see it today with newspaper paywalls and the like. Curious example, since this was the case for most of the history of journalism.
      • afavour 5y ago
        Not entirely, historically newspapers had both ads and a sale price. That price was subsidised by ads. But you’re right that it’s not so clear. Maybe a more straightforward example is broadcast TV: ABC, NBC and the like. Free at delivery, paid for by ads.
        • archduck 5y ago
          Classifieds were a huge source of income as well.
        • BeetleB 5y ago
          Yes, that's what I meant. Even though it was subsidized by ads, you still needed to pay for it.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • account42 5y ago
      If you wan't social support nets, get your government to create social support nets. Using "but think of the poor" as an excuse for an industry that is designed to get you to part with as much of your money as they can is absurd.
• sharkweek 5y ago
  A great example here with the archive link sitting atop this thread to allow us all to skip past the paywall.
• AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  The other option of "what you can give" is "give up using the service". That is, if you don't want ads, if you don't want to be tracked, and you don't want to mine crypto, the remaining option is to not use the service. If you insist on none of the first three, the service providers will eventually force the fourth option on you. Or, as continuational said, you will have to pay for it.
  • svachalek 5y ago
    The option to walk away if you don't like it is an illusion. Facebook and Google can get an incredible amount of data on you just by tracking your friends. Communications logs, location data, calendar information, and more. The mere existence of the model also funds the continued development of mass surveillance capabilities. I don't see the will to make it happen, anywhere, but the only way out of the current situation is total abolition.
    • blooalien 5y ago
      > … just by tracking your friends. They also track and profile you across the web. Even if you have no account with them, you still get assigned an advertising ID. Everywhere you see a "Share on Facebook" button? Yeah, that button tracks you even if you never click it, and that's just one of zillions of sneaky ways you're still tracked and profiled by the modern advertising industry.
• swlkr 5y ago
  I wouldn't mind if more services were paid only.
• dharma1 5y ago
  Youtube Premium (paid) is well worth the price of admission, to not have to watch ads. Don't think I'd pay for Facebook
  • the-dude 5y ago
    This can be had for free with uBlock Origin ( I never see an ad on YT ).
    • jakubmazanec 5y ago
      That works only on desktop.
      • max_hammer 5y ago
        YouTube Vanced works on Android. Also, Firefox + Unblock.
      • xxs 5y ago
        or anything with that has firefox.
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      Yes, and I'm sure you can jailbreak/root your mobile devices or use a VPN running Pi-hole to remove all YouTube ads. You can also download YouTube videos with youtube-dl (another feature of YouTube Premium). But for me it's well worth the $12 a month to remove ads and get mobile downloads without any hassle or nonsense.
• s0rce 5y ago
  I pay for a bunch of services (Caltopo for topographic maps, bazqux for RSS feeds, google drive for storage space, streaming services, Garmin inReach for satcom). The ones that I don't pay for, I probably wouldn't pay for if they changed models and wouldn't be terribly upset if they went away (Strava, Instagram, Facebook). Some I would miss and might pay for in some form or another (Reddit).
• jimkleiber 5y ago
  Your post inspires me to look at it from a real-world analogy. If I imagine that online ads are the same as offline ads, I start to think about what offline ad tracking would look like. I imagine cameras being on the streets to watch me walk down the street, following me to different stores to see what I buy, with whom I meet, and other activities to inform which billboards/street advertisements should exist. I think about ads being not just on billboards and bus stands, but on the sidewalk, on every skyscraper, or even more functionally annoying, having to physically remove an ad to open a door to a building, or going halfway up the stairs to be hit with a physical ad that drops from the sky and stops me from entering unless I swipe my ID card. I could go on and yet I think some points start to emerge. I'm OK with ads, I don't like the pervasive tracking. I'm OK with ads, I don't like them interrupting the functionality. I actually even like ads when I have some control over them, not them controlling me. Give me more options to choose which types of ads I want to see (not only don't want to see), don't track me to try to guess/manipulate which ones I want to see. Lastly, I think in physical real estate, there are laws about who can advertise, where, and when, and I think in digital real estate, there don't seem to be those regulations and advertisements and ad-tracking creep more and more. While advertisements seem to be one of the best ways to grow income (i.e., more people viewing/more accurate audience = higher ad price), I think an ad does have a ceiling price and then once it hits it, companies start to make more ads, more intrusive ones, and more tracking ones. I think more than anything, I want more agency over the process, and right now, my options for agency are often do nothing, avoid the site completely, constantly click on ads to say "I don't want to see ads like this" and end up seeing more ads tangentially like it, install an ad-blocker, or one of many other almost guerrilla-like tactics to gain some semblance of agency.
  • tempestn 5y ago
    Absolutely agree with this. Both from a consumer perspective and as a website owner I'd prefer to have ads that are simply intended to appeal to the expected audience for that site/content, as you would expect for offline ads. Unfortunately it doesn't tend to be a good use of time for small to medium operators to curate their own ads directly, so in order to get there we need major ad networks to support this, and, critically, advertisers on those platforms to see value in contextual ads vs precise targeting and tracking. I do think that value is there though. Some of our best marketing for AutoTempest has been through youtube sponsorships where we find creators and videos relating to cars and car buying, and work with with the creator to include a pitch for our service in exchange for (usually) a flat fee. It's dead simple for both sides, and as long as what you're advertising is legitimately useful and you're transparent about the relationship, the response from viewers tends to be very positive. I suppose it could be trickier if your product had a very niche audience, but I would think these days there are corners of the web targeting every niche, so you just need to find where your potential customers hang out, and go there, rather than trying to target them wherever they might be.
• leokennis 5y ago
  Re: blocking ads guilt free: Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN: > “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site. You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site. You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then. But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads. If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ElFitz 5y ago
    > But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads. If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it. One of my personal favorites: movie theatres. You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies. The best of both worlds, really. Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.
• giancarlostoro 5y ago
  I would honestly have paid Facebook a monthly sub long ago if they had asked, but they've grown to such a creepy state that I've lost interest in giving them any money. I refuse to buy the Occulus because of the creepy lock-in they're attempting. They've also worked hard to merge IG and FB, they're just waiting for the right moment to do it. It's really telling when if one of their services has an outage, the rest do as well.
• sleavey 5y ago
  I'm in the same boat as you and I don't have a solution but I would say that I'd be fine if the web were far, far smaller. Most content on the web is trash. The information density of most YouTube videos is so low that it would be quicker to read a concise text article on the topic if such a thing existed (it usually doesn't). Gone are the days (perhaps before 2007 or so) when most blogs were labours of love; now they're mostly clickbait to show ads and affiliate links. Maybe a partial solution to paying for it all is to reduce the amount of content being pumped around the internet in the first place. As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to pay €20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content to whoever wishes to read it.
  • account42 5y ago
    > it would be quicker to read a concise text article on the topic if such a thing existed (it usually doesn't) Often it does, but Google pushes youtube videos to the top of the search results. The same Google that earns money from ads shown along those videos of course.
• woudsma 5y ago
  I don't mind to pay for privacy and transparency. FB and other platforms are hoarding and abusing highly personal information for profit, they're parasites.
• SimeVidas 5y ago
  You’re confusing ads with tracking. Do we have any proof that regular, old non-tracking ads could not sustain a top website? I’ve heard stories that websites can actually earn more by excluding all the ad tech middlemen from the equation.
• phkahler 5y ago
  >> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow. For the sake of argument, lets assume FaceBook is a top-grade product that people currently don't pay for with money. It exists because advertisers pay FB. The targeting of ads to individual users allegedly results in a high CTR or whatever. Without targeting, FaceBook can still sell ads but they will be less targeted, and presumably have a lower CTR. That means they will be less valuable than other forms of ads and the ad spend will be adjusted accordingly. That seems bad for our "free" service. OTOH if we stop targeting in all areas, there will be no medium that is "better" to put ads and so the spend will likely move in proportion to where peoples eyeballs and ears are, as things used to be. That might actually result in more ad spending in areas like radio, TV, and any other medium that never gained the ability to target specific people. Maybe that's a good thing for us consumers.
  • LargeWu 5y ago
    I don't really even mind if Facebook is targeting ads to me based on the stuff that I do on Facebook. It's when Facebook, and Google, Amazon, whoever, start reaching their tentacles into other spaces where I can't get away from them or don't give them consent that I have a problem.
  • SergeAx 5y ago
    Without targeting we will just see mediocre, if not shitty, all-terrain ads, like those on TV. Men will see ads of women products and vice versa. Internet advertising will become the home ground of big companies, which don't mind spending tons of cash for widest possible audience reach. Small business will be effectively cut out of online ads, except search engines with their keywords targeting.
    • notriddle 5y ago
      The original AdSense was able to target pretty narrowly by matching adverts to the content, not to the user. The same thing seems like it would work for Facebook and YouTube.
• martin_bech 5y ago
  I would happily pay instead.
• dreyfan 5y ago
  > and the economical implications of this. The average HNer has absolutely no clue the economic impact derived from invasive privacy tracking and the not-so-secretive data industry. It's absolutely massive across finance, consumer-facing-anything, insurance, and government. One particularly good journalist covering the topic is Joseph Cox [1]. Follow his work and you'll start to get a tiny sense of how massive we're talking. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/joseph-cox https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/joseph-cox
• Agenttin 5y ago
  I think people have shown to be willing to give direct payment. Twitch subscriptions, Patreon, Kickstarter, even OnlyFans. People will invest in the people and the projects they like. I don't want anything that's advertising supported. Anything. There is no media I want to consume so badly that I'll tolerate ads to watch it. There's no product so interesting I'll view ads to use it. No website contains information I need that badly. People keep saying that without ads we'll have to pay for things. Fine. Sure. Set up a Patreon. I give money on Github to a few projects I rely on to make sure their maintainers don't get day jobs. I couldn't afford to pay a programmer's salary, but I can afford to pay a small percentage of one. I think the problem has actually been the donation button itself. You want $1 a month out of me that's a pretty easy sell. You want me to sign up for your website and give you my credit card information and you're SOL. I tried to donate to VoiceMeeter a few months back because it's so good. They only accept $20 donations, no more no less, and their payment system wasn't working. Just, like, get a Venmo.
  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    On the one hand I want something like a "Donation Feed" similar to an RSS feed. Something that I can put money into, set rules for, and over a period of time dispense cents/fractions of a bitcoin/whatever as per rules. The rules - and default rules in particular! - would be important. Maybe you like the author so much you donate on the regular just anyway. Maybe a plugin in my browser can see when I visit a site and automatically donate. If I don't visit the site, it doesn't pay. Maybe you donate 0.1 of a cent to ANY website that has no ads or doesn't trigger your adblocker. $1 buys you 1000 such visits. Then a RSS-like "Donation" button would be meaningful for longer term income, without all the hassle of Patreon etc. OTOH, I worry that sites would then start watching such transactions and try setting floor limits for how much you need to donate before they serve you. Any ruleset will inspire gaming that ruleset.
    • fuzxi 5y ago
      Are you thinking of something like Flattr?
      • 5y ago
• diffeomorphism 5y ago
  How about ads without surveillance? Sure, they are paying less, but how much? 2 times? 10 times? 50 times? Does this change if nobody is allowed to do surveillance? I.e. if privacy-respecting ads are not competing with more intrusive ads, does the price change? I think discussing options is a waste of time if we don't have any data to base our decisions on.
• forgotmypw17 5y ago
  I think the answer is small social networks for several hundred and thousand people at a time, running on hosting which can cost 10-20 bucks a month. Of course, that would mean techies stepping up and doing this for their families and tribes... Many of us seem to be preoccupied with chasing the advertising dollar which exploits those same people.
• ikiris 5y ago
  A lot of this crowd thinks toll everything is the right solution, since there is a heavy libertarian... presence.
• cortesoft 5y ago
  Switch back to content based ads, which is what we had prior to the internet. If you have a car related product, advertise on car related websites. Don't try to advertise to a car person visiting a Jazz music site. I think going back to content based advertising will greatly improve the quality of content on the internet. The way it works now, the most valuable content is the cheapest content that can get valuable eyes to look at it, which leads to clickbait and low effort content. If advertisers can only make ad decisions based on the content, quality content will be more valuable.
• voisin 5y ago
  I think the issue is that there isn’t a transparent option to pay directly. Why not say “opt out of tracking and pay $5/mo, or allow ad tracking” and see what people choose?
• corford 5y ago
  Perhaps the answer is a lot of these services are less vital and desired as their MAU figures lead everyone to believe. If someone really wants or needs something, they'll find a way to pay for it (directly or indirectly) if access cannot be had any other way. Everything else is "nice to have" until the cost or friction gets a little higher than zero. The fact that people are increasingly unwilling to "pay for" things like FB seems to suggest these services are not actually _that_ vital despite their high usage figures.
  • bllguo 5y ago
    nobody pays (directly) for Google search but surely most would agree search engines are vital. clearly the advertising business model has enabled certain products in a way that direct purchases could not; to reject the model wholesale seems like luddite conservatism
    • corford 5y ago
      Not what I'm implying. Google has kept the friction & effort minimal (by it's very nature, their search engine advertising is a lot less creepy & personally invasive than FBs). The utility of google search is also high enough that I'm quite sure a decent chunk of people would pay a small monthly sub for it if needed (or offered as an alternative option).
• lizard 5y ago
  For me, there are 2 things: 1. I want more honesty and transparency in products and services. I'm tired of being sold something to "Connect with friends and the world around you" that are actually just a front to collect as much information about me as possible to for advertisers. I'm not even opposed to targeted ads, but at this point have to assume that if a product is capable of collecting ever bit of data it can and selling it, it will. Even privacy policies and user agreements are meaningless because they all contain text of the effect that the provider can change the terms at any time. I just want companies to be honest about what they are actually doing and what the cost to me really is. 2. I want ads to back the hell off. I don't mean they need to go away entirely. There are times when I _want_ to learn about different products and find new things to solve problems I have. But I'm tired of them them pushing to get as in my face as possible, of them beating me over the head with problems I don't have, and of them trying to manipulate me into giving them money instead of helping me find things that will actually help me. It's as if product discovery isn't profitable; like companies are afraid to be honest about their products. So instead of making better products, they entire market just makes different colored cheap boxes with nothing inside and uses ads to manipulate as many people into buying them before they figure it out. I block ads guilt free because at this point I honestly don't feel like I can trust any company that participates in this racket. Personally though, I'm might just be willing to give up on products that depend on ad revenue. While I admit I do use some services based on ad-tech, I'm pretty quick to leave any site that complains about my ad-blocker and don't really feel like I'm missing anything. I could probably be convinced to leave most these other services behind if they started making a worse experience of it.
• SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  I think the answer is going to be a form of micropayments. The system we have now is micropayments. Personal data has economic value and we pay with that. The engineering problem is to figure out how to make the payment system less indirect so that companies can't rent seek by extracting more data (payments) for the same service.
• milofeynman 5y ago
  My end game would be knowing who has my data and being able to say no to 3rd parties getting my data. Fine, Facebook knows which hobbies I'm looking at on Instagram and has incredible ads and suggested posts. Ok that's fine. But random 3rd party I don't know getting that data... No thanks.
  • hnra 5y ago
    Neither Facebook or google sells user data though. So you are fine with the current situation?
• thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
  > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction Fantasy world. These products do not exist, as far as I'm aware. The reality is trash products. I couldn't care less if all that trash just vanishes from the internet.
• cactus2093 5y ago
  I wonder this too, and don't forget this is only half the equation. The free platforms need ads to support them, but a lot of the businesses buying the ads might not be able to exist without the direct ad targeting that has been possible the past 5 to 10 years. I'm a big fan of direct to consumer brands, yes some of them turn out to be completely ridiculous (like the infamous Juicero a few years ago), but it's amazing that a small team can dream up a new product or better design and start selling it quickly with minimal risk. The loss of ad targeting definitely benefits big existing retail players and makes things more difficult and costly for consumer product startups.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I think it’s worth pointing out that ad blockers only became popular because ads came to be so badly behaved. The earliest iterations of banner ads weren’t that bad. They were basically print ads with some low-key animations added at worst, and many weren’t even graphical. But then arose an arms race to create the most attention-grabbing, obnoxious ads possible, and ad supported pages quickly became neon disco raves that sucked up CPU cycles and sometimes even hijacked users’ browsers. This was the first tipping point. And then ads became ever more invasive, fingerprinting users in any way possible. This was the second tipping point. Had web ads stayed lightly-enhanced, unscripted print ads, I doubt anybody would care to install an ad blocker, but here we are today where doing so is practically essential not just from a privacy standpoint, but also from a security standpoint (since ads can exploit 0days). So the industry largely brought this upon itself, at least in my eyes.
  • dfrankow 5y ago
    This is prisonner's dilemma / tragedy of the commons. The best-performing ads made more money, anyone who didn't grab attention enough would be strongly pushed towards grabbing more attention by industry norms. It was rational for every individual to grab more attention, but it was bad for the group. Prisoner's dilemma problems are hard to solve.
    • r00fus 5y ago
      It's solved by banning that group/activity. When the value proposition is net-negative, there should be curbs on such activity.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • presentation 5y ago
        Who's gonna ban? I'm cynical but if it's the ad network, then other ad networks will not ban that behavior and in turn outcompete the one that did. If it's the government (somewhere), there's a high probability the implementation of it will either be unenforceable (slap on the wrist for players making crazy money) or poorly implemented to the point of being counterproductive (can even happen if different governments have contradictory frameworks).
• neolog 5y ago
  Browsers can support microtransactions for pageviews. That would avoid many of the problems, but not all.
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  >If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction Don't want.
• GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Nothing. I'd pay directly. And I do with many sites. But I will block anything else. And cryptominers are not borderline malware. They are malware full stop.
• midhhhthrow 5y ago
  I just think advertisement is when other people pay for the media products you get for free, if you don’t buy the ad product. It’s a plus. Why are people so charged up about it? If you don’t want to be manipulated by ads then just don’t be.
  • chefkoch 5y ago
    >If you don’t want to be manipulated by ads then just don’t be. If you are depressed, just don't be?
• tshaddox 5y ago
  > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), Is Facebook a "higher-grade" social networking product than other free ones that exist without the same monetization of personal data, or than other free ones that could exist without the same monetization of personal data if such monetization of personal data was considered unacceptable? I don't doubt that Facebook delivers more value to shareholders than if they were not able to monetize personal data to the same extent, but I see no reason to believe that they or their competitors would be less of a "top-grade product."
• rhizome 5y ago
  Run ads internally for a period of time disconnected from the number of clicks. It's worked well for decades. Basically, to reduce the integration of ads and browsers.
• atoav 5y ago
  Run ads but don't target them. Target them by paying facebook groups or individuals to post them, give FB a share.
• spideymans 5y ago
  >I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there? I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX anti-patterns and other crap. There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking, people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device purchases). If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay, say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.
• afpx 5y ago
  I'm less concerned about incompetent advertisers (99% of the ads I see are poorly placed) than I am about rogue states (like Saudi Arabia, who buy a lot of personal data and metadata), finance and investment companies (who use our private data to rig the system against us), and criminals.
• BeetleB 5y ago
  It would be good to list what features are really of value to us that are funded by ads. For me, I pay for email and web hosting. The only big thing I rely on is news, I believe. And Internet search. Youtube is mostly useless except when I'm trying to repair stuff at home. Almost everything else falls into the category of "entertainment", for which there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve ads. If there is one thing there is no shortage of in this country, it's entertainment. Most of the (non-news) articles I read online really don't add much to my life, and there were plenty of choices pre-Internet (e.g. magazine subscriptions). I'm happy to get ad-subsidized stuff like they did in the old days (news + magazines) because although it was annoying, it was not invasive. So apart from Internet search, I'm having trouble finding anything that is (invasive) ad supported that benefits my life. If most of these things will go away, I will happily revert to the old ways. I'm definitely not happier now because of ad supported services.
• pyrale 5y ago
  > By "our" I mean the typical HN crowd that understands both the technological and the economical implications of this. If we did really understand the implications of the society we live in, we would not stop at selecting "don't track me" on a phone. We're living through a major extinction, we know that the next century is going to be a bloodbath, we know this crisis has been brought to us by productivism, and we're discussing whether it's fair to ignore calls for more consumerism on our phones.
• quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there? I am perfectly willing to see ads as an indirect payment for free services. Show me some ads with tasteful photography, good art, or a nice pun. I might even click on them and buy something! This is not new, we have been doing this for centuries. What we currently have are hardly good ads in any way, shape, or form. They rely upon invasive tracking to show you lazy creepy notifications like “Oh you live in 123 Evergreen St. and bought a toaster recently? Here are ads for five other toasters!". Ugh, no thanks. Advertising is fine. Getting rid of invasive personal tracking will allow the creativity and art to come back into advertising.
• bradleyjg 5y ago
  > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow. Do we want them to though? What would a web without free look like?
• titzer 5y ago
  Give me the web from 1997, but just with a little more. Mostly ad-free, text, tables, webpages measured in kilobytes. It was self-supporting and didn't require megabit connections. It had chatrooms and forums and craptons of technical documentation. It was a maker's place, a hobbyist place, and a place where Mom&Pop shops could have national or global reach. There were oodles of online stores. It was considered rude to track visitors, and cookies weren't even a thing. Amazon and eBay were already a thing. The small additions I might enjoy might be some flash games, Wikipedia, and blogs; these were early 2000s IIRC. I would actually draw the line at Youtube. It's great and all, but it could as well not be the web, but a dedicated native app for all I care, but give me the old YouTube at its very first breakeven point[1]. We pretend like the current multi-hundred billion dollar Crapshow Creeper Web full of carnival barkers hounding you every second is absolutely necessary, and it's not. What fucked up the Web was money--way too much of it. We're in a denial phase with the Web bubble desperately pumped up with steroids to support multiple 800 pound gorilla/leeches that provide little value other than "scale" (or some shit). [1] (and Google will never publicly say when that was, but definitely before 2010--it's just that the stupid growthism mindset required absurd revenue growth to keep up with stockholder and executive greed).
• mlindner 5y ago
  > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free") I don't actually. If I could pay for something that gives good value and by doing so I also shut off all tracking of any kind, I'd do so, assuming it was something I was interested in.
• _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I think the path of centralised internet advertising organisations is to blame for many ills. IE Google. By outsourcing ads to a 3rd party the website has lost an element of control over their "own space on the internet" and hence led to mish mash crap on so many sites - and it follows you making the sites all blend into one another! I would accept a website to host it's own static advertising - not GIF, not video, not audio - that doesn't discriminate between myself and fellow humans. A website on my browser, or any similar browser around the world, should be the same, barring accessibility differences. This would bring us back to motoring websites having ads for cars, tech websites having ads for tech etc. People don't get tracked, they get ads relevant to their interests, and pages look cohesive and have an identity.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  There was a time when I cared a lot about small publishers' abilities to monetize their cool free site. Those sites are all gone, and never made enough money to break even anyway. I say screw it, drive the ad industry into the dust.
• Dove 5y ago
  I had an old dream of building a good micropayment scheme for the web. Notionally, I'd like to pay $10/mo (or whatever) for "web content", and have some algorithm divvy that up into fractions of pennies for sites I momentarily visit. The devil's in the details, for sure. Such a system would immediately turn into an arms race between running it fairly and gaming it. At the end of the day, what I want the internet to give me is neither impressions nor time spent, but value, and only I can really judge that - but I don't really want to be thinking about judging it all the time. The best scheme I came up with was one that tracked time/impressions/whatever and came up with a default payment for a given site, and let me adjust it if I felt it was high or low. The second problem was -- what's up with $10/mo? Might that be low, for specialized content? High, for poor people? I had set it based on gut feel relative to the price I was paying my ISP at the time. I thought that perhaps what I'm paying by default can be negotiated with paywalls behind the scenes, and if it isn't high enough they can ask me for more for the one impression, and I can set it higher ongoing if I like what they have. An alternative approach was the one pursued by Project Wonderful, which had advertisers bidding against each other for space on a web site and (maybe it was this project or another) users bidding against those advertisers for those spaces to be blank! The free market enthusiast in me loves that in principle. In practice, projects in that vein all failed for reasons I don't understand. That leads into a third problem, though. A lot of the value I get out of the internet is user-generated on larger sites -- like comments on this one. I appreciate Reddit pioneering some ways to thank these people, but as for making a larger and more general fair solution, I must admit I'm a bit lost. I dislike the idea of paying Facebook for aggregating the content of people I really want to be thanking and taking all the money for it (which is in fact, more or less what happens now). With that said, I do like services that have this sort of fee for subscription for all content model. It seems to be dominating these days, and I take that as validation that the scheme is fundamentally the right way to go about solving the problem. But it needs another iteration. I hate having a dozen content subscriptions. I hate that they come in "a month" as the smallest size. And I hate that it gives the network so much control over where my money goes -- these schemes are notoriously unfair to creators. It would be much better if my relationship was with the creators directly, as I know what things are worth to me. If I could just cruise onto YouTube and it would hit my GlobalContentPayer up for $0.30 for an hour of ad free viewing (or $19.99 for a movie that just came out) or whatever, I'd be a much happier camper. I'm willing to pay you, but I don't really want that much of a relationship. I definitely hate one-sided ad relationships. I don't mind ads like the old newspaper classifieds -- where both I and the advertiser got value out of it and that's the only reason it worked. Information exchanges are good, and if both parties are paying for access, that's a good sign of their health. One-sided ad relationships in which I am a product and not a party are inherently toxic. While I am sympathetic to creators needing a way to support themselves, that sympathy doesn't extend to allowing that sort of psychological abuse into my life. I avoid these sorts of ads whenever I can, in any way I can, without remorse.
• deleted 5y ago
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• mLuby 5y ago
  Thought-provoking questions! For me, ad-tech creates a few interrelated concerns: 1. Pervasive, asymmetric surveillance increases the power differential between individuals and big corps/governments. The latter groups can use that power to preempt healthy competition, causing individual quality of life to stagnate in a local maximum. 2. Ads themselves are attention hijacking, thought injection, and manipulation/coercion—all forms of mind control. Most people consider their mind central to who they are (often along with body, memories, and personality), it's wrong to mess with that non-consensually. (No, clicking "accept ToS" isn't consent.) 3. Centralizing surveillance data (as by companies and governments) prevents the surveilled from protecting their own vulnerabilities from bad actors. It's like passwords: you can invest in memorizing many strong ones, or re-use one that's written on a post-it on your desk, but since in this metaphor the surveillants are also storing your password in plaintext in paper filing cabinets, so it doesn't matter how much effort you put into protecting your passwords. Put another way, if the Coke recipe or a Boeing blueprint were leaked, it's the company's loss, so they work hard to protect their secrets. But if someone hacks a consumer company's user data, it's the users who are affected; if it weren't for regulatory fines and news exposés, companies wouldn't even be hurt by such breaches. As for the end-game goals: Companies surveil and advertise because they're allowed to and it works. We see futuristic attention hijacking tech in sci-fi films and TV, like giant holograms [Blade Runner], ads that address each individual [Minority Report], or ads that stop until you're paying attention again [Black Mirror]. But it's less common to see futuristic attention protection tech. (That makes sense if you consider the funding source of these sci-fi productions.) Black Mirror did have one episode where a person was exiled from everyone else's senses, but I can't think of others. [It works] The individual's goal could be total control over perception of the world. As a natural-born human, you can easily close your eyes, but your other senses are harder to dampen, and so provide vectors for involuntary thought injection (ads). Now with widespread earbud use, you can sort of close your ears too. But imagine installing an ad-blocker so your senses just didn't report ads, or your brain didn't perceive them? As with many technologies, it'd be quite dystopian if centrally controlled, quite freeing if under individual control. Even more fantastical would be the ability to experience but be unaffected by stimuli (including ads), which might not even be a technology exactly. [They're allowed] The other goal could be simply to use our collective power (i.e. government) to more strictly regulate—or even ban—surveillance and advertising (and enforce it!). While this always possible, I'm afraid it's no longer realistic in U.S., though other countries could still pull it off, as could whatever government eventually replaces the American one. Lastly, what if nothing were free? Part of the problem is that the difference between $0 and $1 is much, much larger than from $1 to $2, i.e. free is a way better price than even dirt cheap (or sometimes even being paid). Tech start-ups are especially guilty abusing the marketing power of "free" in combination with unsustainable infusions of venture capital, which is dishonest if not somewhat fraudulent. Business would survive the removal of tactics like "free + ads" and "loss leaders".
• largbae 5y ago
  There are plenty of examples: Microsoft Office 365, Netflix, YouTube's paid service, Amazon Prime. Let me pay Facebook or Google for the services I value. They might even be cheaper to deliver if my data wasn't constantly harvested and correlated.
• no_time 5y ago
  >what "our" ideal end-game goal is? A global ban on targeted advertising. Fines in % of global revenue instead of fixed sums. Bankruptcy of adtech companies and concerts in the ruins of their headquarters.
• yosito 5y ago
  > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction I don't think the typical HN user insists on not paying for the software we use. I don't understand people who insist they want unpaid software.
• herbst 5y ago
  I stopped using classic ads for monetarization years ago. Coming from someone who lived of AdSense for a while. What I do is Building relevant ads to my content when I find fitting affiliate programs. As they are just text (or image) with an link they ain't blocked and respect my users privacy. I would argue that are the only actually targeted ads. And lucky content creators won't be blocked either (usually) Other projects I just go for a paid or free/paid model.
• srg0 5y ago
  > what "our" ideal end-game goal is? I think most HN users will agree that the good stuff costs money. So the question is really who pays, and how. For me the ideal end-game is ability to get what I want through a direct pay-as-you-go transaction. In the ideal world this transaction is explicit, instant, anonymous, nearly zero overhead and non-recurring. Explicit, because as a consumer I want to be able to say no, and know exactly when I engage in a transaction. Instant, because waiting X working days sucks. Anonymous, because there are many reasons to stay anonymous. Zero overhead, because we want to cut middlemen. Non-recurring, because a recurring payment is _always_ an up-sell. Paper money works great in the offline world. Any kind of an indirect payment is not ideal because it takes control from the consumer and gives it to someone else.
  • account42 5y ago
    > I think most HN users will agree that the good stuff costs money. So the question is really who pays, and how. Advertisement does not pay for the vast majority of content created. The creators pay by spending their free time making it.