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This is one of the main reasons I think advertising is harmful and all ads should be blocked. We don't have a problem with shortage of content, we have a proble

This is one of the main reasons I think advertising is harmful and all ads should be blocked. We don't have a problem with shortage of content, we have a problem with filtering out all the bullshit where they've put all the effort into search engine optimization and ad monetization, and no effort into creating content. Ad apologists will claim "but how will we fund content creation!" and the answer is, if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now. "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. They're the ones creating the filtering problem. Paid, quality content creation inherently doesn't scale because it's inherently serial: a person/team creates one piece of content at a time. You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality creation. And the fact is, people will create because they want to create, even if they aren't paid to do so. Maybe they are paid, but that's secondary to the human need to create. As Quincy Jones said, "When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room."

mschuster91 4y ago
> "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. The problem is, payment is hard. For authors: - Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive - Users want it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible, which means you're stuck with Stripe, Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal as that is what people have, and they don't want to trust Joe Random Blogger with their credit card information or their real name - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime) - Accounting is annoying because each micro-donator needs a formal invoice, you have to deal with dozens to hundreds of micro invoices at tax time - You're virtually stuck with credit cards and their limitations (again, see above, most of PayPal's ridiculous policies comes from the big CC networks) if your audience is international, but guess what, less than half of Germans have one [1], and outside of Europe the situation is even worse. For users: - Fuck no I don't want to fill out a form with CC number, CVC code, my real name and my address just to give a dollar for Joe Random Blogger's coffee cash - Fuck no where did I just put my phone for 2FA - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters? - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$ The centralized entities (Paypal, Stripe, ko-fi, Patreon, whatever) take care of a ton of the associated bullshit, but they are expensive and, as I wrote, prone to randomly ban you without recourse - and not just ban your commercial entity but also your personal account - for life. In contrast, ads are easy: you embed some piece of code on your website (or set some identifiers in your WordPress theme/plugin) and get a check or bank transfer every month. That's it. [1] https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/ https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > The problem is, payment is hard. Ehhh, it's not hard, it's just centralized, with the associated problems of a few entities having an oligopoly. I can have Stripe and/or Patreon integrated with a site in a few hours of work. PayPal isn't hard to integrate either, they just suck. (I have no experience with Ko-Fi). > Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive So don't do micropayments. Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive, and it makes you more dependent on loyal fans rather than generous drive-bys. It's harder to get loyal fans--you have to produce quality content--but when you get them it's a more stable source of income. And from the perspective of content consumers, that's exactly what I want: higher quality content. Larger payments also means your account doesn't get used as often by hackers testing out credit card numbers they bought off the darkweb. > - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime) Yeah, that's a real problem, and one of the reasons we need legally-mandated payment-neutrality if we're going to give so much power to credit card companies. You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception: cryptocurrency is a viable workaround for content creators that need a workaround (which isn't most content creators). But to be clear, I'm not talking about crypto-bro flavor of the week: USDC is pretty ideal for this, or the two popular zk-Snark/ring signature privacy coins[1] if privacy is desirable. Variable value is a problem, not a feature, so I don't see a reason to accept that unless you have a need for privacy: paying with Bitcoin is dumb. > - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters? > - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$ Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do that by providing quality content, not by spamming or stealing. [1] I'm not naming these coins by name because that tends to get flagged.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Ehhh, it's not hard, it's just centralized, with the associated problems of a few entities having an oligopoly. It's hard to pull it off without relying on the oligopoly entities. Like, I can publish my SEPA banking information on my blog, but that would just invite scammers. And it's not real-time which means I have to manually process payments. And that's just dealing with the payment itself and not solving the problem of accounting and taxes. It's a difference if I go to my tax preparer and hand him twelve advertising revenue bills or if I'm handing him a wad of receipts by individual people. > Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive They are, but good luck getting people used to free content to pay that range. Even 99.9% of Onlyfxns models rarely make a single subscriber above that. Cheap mass content is what the market wants (no matter if in porn or blogs), you got to fulfill a very specific niche if you want to lure in some whales. > You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception Cryptocurrencies bring in their own host of problems: - people will automatically discard your opinion simply because you offer crypto - the NFT and shitcoin crazes as well as the environmental issues crypto has (e-waste, CO2 footprint, ...) have burnt so many people that offering crypto acceptance these days outside of anonymity context (e.g. VPNs, piracy) is just as negative on your brand as paying for Twitter Blue is (which is why Musk decided to not show any more if an account is legacy-verified or Twitter Blue subscriber). - can't do KYC any more so you have a harder time doing taxes (may be more of an European problem, given the IRS seems to even allow you to enter crime proceedings - if I would do that on my taxes here in Germany, I'd get the cops knocking on my door) - your whole infrastructure will now be targeted by sometimes highly sophisticated attackers going after your coins > Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do that by providing quality content, not by spamming or stealing. As a user, all I have at a moment is to look how the content currently is. I have no recourse when the author decides to sell out, similarly to what happened to MANY Chrome extensions that suddenly went and embedded malware (e.g. [1]), or when they / their database get inevitably hacked. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/4/22266798/chrome-blocks-the-great-suspender-disabled-malware-tab-recovery https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/4/22266798/chrome-blocks-the...
saghm 4y ago
> You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality creation I'm going to have to start quoting this; it's a much more succinct argument than I've heard before, and it captures the essence far better than I would be able to do even with many more words.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  It's not my first try: I've had years of having this discussion to improve its communication. I'm glad I've improved it enough that somebody thinks I'm doing it well!
dfxm12 4y ago
"but how will we fund content creation!" If I'm being honest, most "content" I've come across on the web doesn't deserve to be funded and its creators are better served creating something else if they're looking to be compensated. people will create because they want to create What great content I have come across is usually created within a similar ethos to FOSS. People know they've learned a great deal from others in the past and want to pay it forward, or they want to share something with the world to see how others might iterate upon it. if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now I've also seen great content from people connected to a patreon, so there is definitely room for compensation, if the content is good enough.
- nicbou 4y ago
  There is a class of content that is not interesting enough and requires too much work to be maintained by hobbyists. Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics. Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do. I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger. Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table. More in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35522059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35522059
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    > Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics. > Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do. ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations. But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse. > I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger. You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted. > Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table. That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.
Someone 4y ago
> and all ads should be blocked I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that. Define “ad”. Is “read more in my blog” an ad? Is “see Foo’s blog at …” an ad? “Read Foo’s excellent blog”? “Read more here” in a blog entry? If you say “when it is paid for it’s an ad”, how do you detect that? And what is “paid”? In a webring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring) people reciprocally ‘pay’ each other by providing incoming links, thus all gaining reputation. The difference with a citation ring (https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/03/23/citation-statistics-and-citation-rings/ https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/03/23/citation-stati...) is subtle. And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online?
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that. > Define “ad”. "How to define 'ad'" is a question worth asking, because it is important that we block ads without blocking valuable content. And how to block harder-to-detect forms of ads is a real, open problem. But it's just not an argument that blocking ads is impractical. The vast majority of ads are ones that no one is confused about, and which can be detected fairly easily. Imperfect != impractical. What you're saying is an example of a perfect solution fallacy. Obviously adblocking is never going to be perfect, but it works pretty well. > And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online? Not in a void, the way you're presenting it. I'm proposing blocking all ads, not just newcomers' ads. Ads provide the greatest advantage to the best-funded, and that's usually not newcomers. Advertising benefits entrenched interests, not newcomers. Uniformly blocking all ads would be a boon to newcomers, not a harm. At a more fundamental level, ads fundamentally prevent capitalism from providing the greatest value for the least cost. Ads allow advertisers to provide lower value at greater cost by spending more money on advertising. An absence of advertising means that people find out about products from higher-signal-to-noise ratio sources of information, such as independent review sites, word-of-mouth, and subject experts. Consumer reports is an excellent ROI: buy nice or buy twice. My friends are better at recommending books and movies to me than any advertiser. And it should be the responsibility of the FDA to disseminate information about new treatments to doctors, and the responsibility of doctors/prescribers to keep up-to-date: drug ads and prescriber kickbacks from pharmaceuticals should be unequivocally illegal.

mschuster91 4y ago

> "But that doesn't scale!" cries Hacker News. But what you mean is, it doesn't scale for a centralized entity that wants to collect rent on other people's work, and frankly, fuck those centralized entities. The problem is, payment is hard. For authors: - Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive - Users want it to be as simple and hassle-free as possible, which means you're stuck with Stripe, Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal as that is what people have, and they don't want to trust Joe Random Blogger with their credit card information or their real name - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime) - Accounting is annoying because each micro-donator needs a formal invoice, you have to deal with dozens to hundreds of micro invoices at tax time - You're virtually stuck with credit cards and their limitations (again, see above, most of PayPal's ridiculous policies comes from the big CC networks) if your audience is international, but guess what, less than half of Germans have one [1], and outside of Europe the situation is even worse. For users: - Fuck no I don't want to fill out a form with CC number, CVC code, my real name and my address just to give a dollar for Joe Random Blogger's coffee cash - Fuck no where did I just put my phone for 2FA - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters? - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$ The centralized entities (Paypal, Stripe, ko-fi, Patreon, whatever) take care of a ton of the associated bullshit, but they are expensive and, as I wrote, prone to randomly ban you without recourse - and not just ban your commercial entity but also your personal account - for life. In contrast, ads are easy: you embed some piece of code on your website (or set some identifiers in your WordPress theme/plugin) and get a check or bank transfer every month. That's it. [1] https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/ https://kreditkarte.net/zahlungsverkehr/

kerkeslager 4y ago
> The problem is, payment is hard. Ehhh, it's not hard, it's just centralized, with the associated problems of a few entities having an oligopoly. I can have Stripe and/or Patreon integrated with a site in a few hours of work. PayPal isn't hard to integrate either, they just suck. (I have no experience with Ko-Fi). > Micropayments are still ridiculously expensive So don't do micropayments. Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive, and it makes you more dependent on loyal fans rather than generous drive-bys. It's harder to get loyal fans--you have to produce quality content--but when you get them it's a more stable source of income. And from the perspective of content consumers, that's exactly what I want: higher quality content. Larger payments also means your account doesn't get used as often by hackers testing out credit card numbers they bought off the darkweb. > - PayPal has been known to randomly close down accounts and hold your money hostage for months and years, especially if you're dealing with "morally grey" content (e.g. if you write about sex or anything related to crime) Yeah, that's a real problem, and one of the reasons we need legally-mandated payment-neutrality if we're going to give so much power to credit card companies. You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception: cryptocurrency is a viable workaround for content creators that need a workaround (which isn't most content creators). But to be clear, I'm not talking about crypto-bro flavor of the week: USDC is pretty ideal for this, or the two popular zk-Snark/ring signature privacy coins[1] if privacy is desirable. Variable value is a problem, not a feature, so I don't see a reason to accept that unless you have a need for privacy: paying with Bitcoin is dumb. > - Why is Joe Random Blogger now blasting my email address with newsletters? > - Uh, I did not consent Joe Random Blogger to suddenly draw in 20$ a month instead of 5$ Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do that by providing quality content, not by spamming or stealing. [1] I'm not naming these coins by name because that tends to get flagged.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Ehhh, it's not hard, it's just centralized, with the associated problems of a few entities having an oligopoly. It's hard to pull it off without relying on the oligopoly entities. Like, I can publish my SEPA banking information on my blog, but that would just invite scammers. And it's not real-time which means I have to manually process payments. And that's just dealing with the payment itself and not solving the problem of accounting and taxes. It's a difference if I go to my tax preparer and hand him twelve advertising revenue bills or if I'm handing him a wad of receipts by individual people. > Payments in the range of $5-$10 are less expensive They are, but good luck getting people used to free content to pay that range. Even 99.9% of Onlyfxns models rarely make a single subscriber above that. Cheap mass content is what the market wants (no matter if in porn or blogs), you got to fulfill a very specific niche if you want to lure in some whales. > You'll rarely hear me say anything positive about cryptocurrency, but this is a rare exception Cryptocurrencies bring in their own host of problems: - people will automatically discard your opinion simply because you offer crypto - the NFT and shitcoin crazes as well as the environmental issues crypto has (e-waste, CO2 footprint, ...) have burnt so many people that offering crypto acceptance these days outside of anonymity context (e.g. VPNs, piracy) is just as negative on your brand as paying for Twitter Blue is (which is why Musk decided to not show any more if an account is legacy-verified or Twitter Blue subscriber). - can't do KYC any more so you have a harder time doing taxes (may be more of an European problem, given the IRS seems to even allow you to enter crime proceedings - if I would do that on my taxes here in Germany, I'd get the cops knocking on my door) - your whole infrastructure will now be targeted by sometimes highly sophisticated attackers going after your coins > Again, these tend to be problems with lower-quality content. If you're trying to build a loyal fanbase you do that by providing quality content, not by spamming or stealing. As a user, all I have at a moment is to look how the content currently is. I have no recourse when the author decides to sell out, similarly to what happened to MANY Chrome extensions that suddenly went and embedded malware (e.g. [1]), or when they / their database get inevitably hacked. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/4/22266798/chrome-blocks-the-great-suspender-disabled-malware-tab-recovery https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/4/22266798/chrome-blocks-the...

saghm 4y ago

> You can scale distribution, but you can't scale quality creation I'm going to have to start quoting this; it's a much more succinct argument than I've heard before, and it captures the essence far better than I would be able to do even with many more words.

kerkeslager 4y ago
It's not my first try: I've had years of having this discussion to improve its communication. I'm glad I've improved it enough that somebody thinks I'm doing it well!

dfxm12 4y ago

"but how will we fund content creation!" If I'm being honest, most "content" I've come across on the web doesn't deserve to be funded and its creators are better served creating something else if they're looking to be compensated. people will create because they want to create What great content I have come across is usually created within a similar ethos to FOSS. People know they've learned a great deal from others in the past and want to pay it forward, or they want to share something with the world to see how others might iterate upon it. if the content is actually good, people will be willing to pay for it--probably even if not forced to do so: lots of content creation is being funded by donations right now I've also seen great content from people connected to a patreon, so there is definitely room for compensation, if the content is good enough.

nicbou 4y ago
There is a class of content that is not interesting enough and requires too much work to be maintained by hobbyists. Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics. Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do. I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger. Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table. More in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35522059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35522059
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > Perhaps you will always find people willing to write interesting content about vintage computers, but you won't find many people who want to write about the intricacies of local bureaucracy, the tax system, and other boring-but-necessary topics. > Donations just don't work, and people should stop pretending they do. ProPublica and Mother Jones are doing just fine on donations. But more to the point, these are absolutely not topics we want advertisers to have control over. I'll admit that donations leave many important forms of content underfunded, but the alternative you're proposing is a well-funded fox in charge of the henhouse. > I make literally 100 times more from affiliate marketing than I do from donations. If I had no integrity, that multiple would be even bigger. You might have integrity but you're a stopped clock: even when it's right it's never useful. The only means your customers without expert knowledge have of distinguishing your motivations is by looking at your funding, and as long as you accept incentives to lie, you can't be trusted. > Let me put this another way: the bare minimum level of affiliate marketing covers all my expenses. Donations don't ever buy groceries. I could not put this much effort into my work if I had to get another job to put food on the table. That's not evidence that donations don't work. That's just evidence you've built your business around advertising and not donations.

Someone 4y ago

> and all ads should be blocked I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that. Define “ad”. Is “read more in my blog” an ad? Is “see Foo’s blog at …” an ad? “Read Foo’s excellent blog”? “Read more here” in a blog entry? If you say “when it is paid for it’s an ad”, how do you detect that? And what is “paid”? In a webring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring) people reciprocally ‘pay’ each other by providing incoming links, thus all gaining reputation. The difference with a citation ring (https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/03/23/citation-statistics-and-citation-rings/ https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2022/03/23/citation-stati...) is subtle. And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online?

kerkeslager 4y ago
> I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that. > Define “ad”. "How to define 'ad'" is a question worth asking, because it is important that we block ads without blocking valuable content. And how to block harder-to-detect forms of ads is a real, open problem. But it's just not an argument that blocking ads is impractical. The vast majority of ads are ones that no one is confused about, and which can be detected fairly easily. Imperfect != impractical. What you're saying is an example of a perfect solution fallacy. Obviously adblocking is never going to be perfect, but it works pretty well. > And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online? Not in a void, the way you're presenting it. I'm proposing blocking all ads, not just newcomers' ads. Ads provide the greatest advantage to the best-funded, and that's usually not newcomers. Advertising benefits entrenched interests, not newcomers. Uniformly blocking all ads would be a boon to newcomers, not a harm. At a more fundamental level, ads fundamentally prevent capitalism from providing the greatest value for the least cost. Ads allow advertisers to provide lower value at greater cost by spending more money on advertising. An absence of advertising means that people find out about products from higher-signal-to-noise ratio sources of information, such as independent review sites, word-of-mouth, and subject experts. Consumer reports is an excellent ROI: buy nice or buy twice. My friends are better at recommending books and movies to me than any advertiser. And it should be the responsibility of the FDA to disseminate information about new treatments to doctors, and the responsibility of doctors/prescribers to keep up-to-date: drug ads and prescriber kickbacks from pharmaceuticals should be unequivocally illegal.