6 ms·

No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.

skummetmaelk 5y ago
How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.
- TheIronMark 5y ago
  > How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
  - skummetmaelk 5y ago
    That's not my point. My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really. If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
  - commoner 5y ago
    When the content provider offers the content for free, the viewer obtains the right to consume any portions of the content they want for free. If a website wants to require the viewer to consume all of the content when they view it, they can do that in their terms of service, though it might not be legally enforceable. Most sites don't.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  No, they wouldn't pay for that. This is a dumb myth that people use to brush off their guilt. If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free. We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole. You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
  - skummetmaelk 5y ago
    I support several content creators on Patreon because I greatly value their content and want them to continue making it. I realise not everyone is in a position to do so and that is fine. > If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free. This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist. Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    Many sites on the internet provide little more than infrastructure and moderation for the content provided by users of that site. I think every one of those users has a relevant opinion about the internet itself whether or not they are forking over money or being subjected to advertising. The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    As long as it is possible to make money with ads, the web will be full of SEO-optimized trash, clickbait, and other worthless "content" full of ads, and it will drown out anything of quality. If you're giving them ad views, you're partly responsible for and contributing towards the sorry state of the internet. Start blocking ads, and ask everyone you know to do the same.
capital_guy 5y ago
A lot of people are saying this but I disagree that you are either on one side or the other. If you pay a monthly subscription to the Washington Post, their website is still absolutely covered with advertisements - moving, video, intrusive advertisements that IMHO make the site unusable. So I'm not owed free content. I'm paying for it. And since I'm paying for it, don't shove a bunch of crap down my throat when I want to see the stuff I paid for.
- nescioquid 5y ago
  I don't recall how long ago this was, but I bought a digital subscription to The Economist only to discover the site refused to make good on my subscription while I had an adblocker active. I canceled the subscription explaining why. I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware. Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I would have much less problems with internet advertising if it had the same standards as print advertising when it comes to quality.
perryizgr8 5y ago
The belief that my computer/phone will download and display your ads is also absurd. It just won't, without my explicit consent.
superkuh 5y ago
The fact that you're talking about "content" shows the commercial mindset. The web used to be mostly where people shared information and media about things they loved with no expectation of making money. It still is underneath all the commercial crap piled high within the walled gardens. Take off the profit blinders and see the web can be motivated by other things.
denton-scratch 5y ago
I'm not owed free content; but nor do I owe anyone my eyeballs. If you put up a site on the public internet, then it's reasonable to assume the site's public. If it turns out my assumption is wrong, I just go away - I'm not going to argue with a webmaster who is determined to make me see stuff I don't want to see.
discardedrefuse 5y ago
The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd. Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all. https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metaverse-advertising-uses-eye-tracking.html https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metave...
- robomartin 5y ago
  > The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd. You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense. If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it. You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief. "I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!" Yeah, that's a formula for a better society.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    Who's stealing it? I asked for an article through the customary channels and they served it to me. Inside that article, they offered a whole set of embedded resources for me to choose to load, and I opted out of a lot of them. None of that remotely resembles theft.
    - robomartin 5y ago
      You have obviously convinced yourself it is OK to steal because you think it is OK to steal, because you think it is OK to steal. Good for you. What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences. If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
I pay for more Content than I ever have. Ever. I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others. I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify. The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time. Can't have it both ways. I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own. If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine. I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger. People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.
silisili 5y ago
Does anyone actually feel like they are owed anything for free (site seems down, apologies if the author said as much)? I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.
dpedu 5y ago
The content is just a lure the creator and platform hope bring you in close enough to be hooked by an ad. Sometimes, the fish get away.
alkonaut 5y ago
I don't think anyone feels they are "owed" anything. I do, however, feel I have the right to download whatever someone puts online, and not download and view the adjacent ads. Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.
- cartesius13 5y ago
  I think that the idea that "people would largely stop making content for the web if that weren't ads" is a myth. Sure, the money seeking people wouldn't do it anymore and a lot less people would be able to make a living off of it. But think of all the web content makers that currently don't make a lot of money, which I believe is a lot of people since not everyone who has blog earns a living from it. I'm not saying we wouldn't lose anything but this idea the "90% of the web would disappear or be paywalled" is kinda insane and quite unlikely
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    Based on how many trash sites show up in search (even after search engines' algorithms try hard to downrank garbage), I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of the web is there only to make a quick buck with ads. According to Wikipedia, 90% of all email traffic in 2014 was spam, despite hosting providers and ISPs blocking ports and taking a hard stance on spam. I have no reason to believe the web is much better, especially given that spinning up a trash site is not going to start alerts and get IP blocks banned the same way that sending email spam does. I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web. But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Whats absurd is thinking I should allow attempts at psychological manipulation in my life.

How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.

TheIronMark 5y ago
> How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.
- skummetmaelk 5y ago
  That's not my point. My point is that content has evolved steadily into becoming something that a great deal of the population actually feels bad about consuming. They feel bad about losing hours on Youtube clicking video after video, but they can't stop because their brains have been hijacked by the fine interplay between algorithm and content creator driving this madness. Nobody would pay for this content if they had to. They don't event _want_ to watch it really. If content platforms were forced to have a subscriber model. People would only pay for what they actually _want_ access to.
- commoner 5y ago
  When the content provider offers the content for free, the viewer obtains the right to consume any portions of the content they want for free. If a website wants to require the viewer to consume all of the content when they view it, they can do that in their terms of service, though it might not be legally enforceable. Most sites don't.
Workaccount2 5y ago
No, they wouldn't pay for that. This is a dumb myth that people use to brush off their guilt. If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free. We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole. You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.
- skummetmaelk 5y ago
  I support several content creators on Patreon because I greatly value their content and want them to continue making it. I realise not everyone is in a position to do so and that is fine. > If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free. This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist. Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.
- nescioquid 5y ago
  Many sites on the internet provide little more than infrastructure and moderation for the content provided by users of that site. I think every one of those users has a relevant opinion about the internet itself whether or not they are forking over money or being subjected to advertising. The internet did not spring into being for the sake of ad-tech.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  As long as it is possible to make money with ads, the web will be full of SEO-optimized trash, clickbait, and other worthless "content" full of ads, and it will drown out anything of quality. If you're giving them ad views, you're partly responsible for and contributing towards the sorry state of the internet. Start blocking ads, and ask everyone you know to do the same.

capital_guy 5y ago

A lot of people are saying this but I disagree that you are either on one side or the other. If you pay a monthly subscription to the Washington Post, their website is still absolutely covered with advertisements - moving, video, intrusive advertisements that IMHO make the site unusable. So I'm not owed free content. I'm paying for it. And since I'm paying for it, don't shove a bunch of crap down my throat when I want to see the stuff I paid for.

nescioquid 5y ago
I don't recall how long ago this was, but I bought a digital subscription to The Economist only to discover the site refused to make good on my subscription while I had an adblocker active. I canceled the subscription explaining why. I've since resubscribed as their site no longer does this. It seems so crazy to me that I tried to search for when The Economist changed their policy and found nothing relevant, other than a spate of 2015 stories about how they contracted with an ad-tech firm to determine how many subscribers were using adblockers, but the service subjected their readers to malware. Newspapers have always made their money by selling their audience to advertisers. However, it wasn't too hard to ignore the ads in print and there is a limit to how malicious a print ad can be.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I would have much less problems with internet advertising if it had the same standards as print advertising when it comes to quality.

perryizgr8 5y ago

The belief that my computer/phone will download and display your ads is also absurd. It just won't, without my explicit consent.

superkuh 5y ago

The fact that you're talking about "content" shows the commercial mindset. The web used to be mostly where people shared information and media about things they loved with no expectation of making money. It still is underneath all the commercial crap piled high within the walled gardens. Take off the profit blinders and see the web can be motivated by other things.

denton-scratch 5y ago

I'm not owed free content; but nor do I owe anyone my eyeballs. If you put up a site on the public internet, then it's reasonable to assume the site's public. If it turns out my assumption is wrong, I just go away - I'm not going to argue with a webmaster who is determined to make me see stuff I don't want to see.

discardedrefuse 5y ago

The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd. Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all. https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metaverse-advertising-uses-eye-tracking.html https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metave...

robomartin 5y ago
> The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd. You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense. If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it. You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing the content does not make you virtuous, no matter how you might attempt to distort reality. It makes you a thief. "I don't how you do things, so I am going to steal your product!" Yeah, that's a formula for a better society.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Who's stealing it? I asked for an article through the customary channels and they served it to me. Inside that article, they offered a whole set of embedded resources for me to choose to load, and I opted out of a lot of them. None of that remotely resembles theft.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    You have obviously convinced yourself it is OK to steal because you think it is OK to steal, because you think it is OK to steal. Good for you. What you never see are the jobs you might affect through your actions. You have actually convinced yourself that you are entitled to use someone else's work product without paying for it in any way. All I can say is that I hope one day someone does the same to you. Maybe then you'll understand that theft has consequences. If you don't like advertising, stop stealing the products, services and content it supports.

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

I pay for more Content than I ever have. Ever. I have 600 records, pay directly for a YouTube show, pay for 5 substack blogs, I have hundreds of dvds, 500books, endless video games for multiple consoles, Netflix, hbomax, Hulu, boomerang, Shudder, Amazon, I've had sling, CBS watch, wb archive, criterion, and others. I go through periods of Pandora or Spotify. The reality is every company wants to charge but they all want to be on the open web at the same time. Can't have it both ways. I control what downloads on the internet I pay for, on the device I own. If you didn't erect a paywalls? Your fault. Not mine. I wouldn't bed a stranger without a condom I don't browse without an ad blocker. Or privacy badger. People who understand ad blockers but don't use them are corporate sychophants.

silisili 5y ago

Does anyone actually feel like they are owed anything for free (site seems down, apologies if the author said as much)? I will browse news and articles sometimes -because- they are free. If they were not, I simply no longer visit said page. I don't feel I'm owed their content in any way, and I'm OK just walking away if they decide to paywall it.

dpedu 5y ago

The content is just a lure the creator and platform hope bring you in close enough to be hooked by an ad. Sometimes, the fish get away.

alkonaut 5y ago

I don't think anyone feels they are "owed" anything. I do, however, feel I have the right to download whatever someone puts online, and not download and view the adjacent ads. Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblocker, I'm completely fine with that.

cartesius13 5y ago
I think that the idea that "people would largely stop making content for the web if that weren't ads" is a myth. Sure, the money seeking people wouldn't do it anymore and a lot less people would be able to make a living off of it. But think of all the web content makers that currently don't make a lot of money, which I believe is a lot of people since not everyone who has blog earns a living from it. I'm not saying we wouldn't lose anything but this idea the "90% of the web would disappear or be paywalled" is kinda insane and quite unlikely
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Based on how many trash sites show up in search (even after search engines' algorithms try hard to downrank garbage), I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of the web is there only to make a quick buck with ads. According to Wikipedia, 90% of all email traffic in 2014 was spam, despite hosting providers and ISPs blocking ports and taking a hard stance on spam. I have no reason to believe the web is much better, especially given that spinning up a trash site is not going to start alerts and get IP blocks banned the same way that sending email spam does. I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web. But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago

Whats absurd is thinking I should allow attempts at psychological manipulation in my life.