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The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that

The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that not everyone blocks ads.

fsflover 8mo ago
Ads are intentional psychological manipulation, and nobody should be thankful to anyone allowing this. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
Ukv 8mo ago
Have always felt it's not really any different to allowing a website to run a JS crypto miner. It moves money (which is why it's done) but wastes resources (time/energy) so is on net a detriment to affordability.
- Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
  So then how do you think websites should make money?
  - Ukv 8mo ago
    Many sites already exist to sell products (like Temu) or a paid subscription (like Dropbox), such that ads or crypto miners would just be double-dipping. On average, you would need to pay less than you do now if resources were not wasted on ads/crypto miners. For websites that aren't costly to host (blogs, tutorials, ...), there's often no need to monetize at all. Non-commercial sites on some topic ran by passionate hobbyists are already typically higher quality than sites designed for profiting through adspam/SEO. Donations and volunteer work (like Wikipedia) can be viable where there are non-negligible costs to cover. Grants and public funding can also help if it's a worthwhile cause. Some institutions/people benefit indirectly in recognition from putting information online - like universities, product support forums, or a security researcher writing up an investigation into a malware campaign. Could consider this a form of advertising, but the resources are being used in a productive way rather than just intentionally wasting time. Non-wasteful use of your time and computing resources are also fine by me, like torrent trackers that require you to maintain a minimum seed ratio. Google's CAPTCHAs are already sneakily giving you annotation work, just not paying for it. I'd claim federation also helps, in that services that ostensibly benefit from being one massive site (due to network effect) can actually be split up into smaller more feasible nodes. I use SDF's Mastodon/Lemmy instances for example, and host a Matrix server.
rchaud 8mo ago
Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future. Online ads now are a very different beast compared to what AdWords was from 2002-2007 - not dependent on full-spectrum surveillance through their own browser, their own mobile operating system, video streaming and cloud suite. Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.
- Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
  > Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future. Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself. > Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year. Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap. If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.
  - hogwasher 8mo ago
    Google also takes the lion's share of the ad revenue. They're the reason youtube creators resort to sponsorships instead of relying on youtube's inbuilt ads. They even put ads on the videos of new youtube accounts and profit off them while telling said new accounts that they can't get any of that revenue for their own work until they hit Google's arbitrary threshold of subscribers/views. And they've been abusing the hell out of their chokehold monopoly on ads, via adsense, at every level of the system. Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads. Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.
allarm 8mo ago
That's an evil thing to say. No, that's not true.

The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that not everyone blocks ads.

fsflover 8mo ago

Ads are intentional psychological manipulation, and nobody should be thankful to anyone allowing this. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

Ukv 8mo ago

Have always felt it's not really any different to allowing a website to run a JS crypto miner. It moves money (which is why it's done) but wastes resources (time/energy) so is on net a detriment to affordability.

Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
So then how do you think websites should make money?
- Ukv 8mo ago
  Many sites already exist to sell products (like Temu) or a paid subscription (like Dropbox), such that ads or crypto miners would just be double-dipping. On average, you would need to pay less than you do now if resources were not wasted on ads/crypto miners. For websites that aren't costly to host (blogs, tutorials, ...), there's often no need to monetize at all. Non-commercial sites on some topic ran by passionate hobbyists are already typically higher quality than sites designed for profiting through adspam/SEO. Donations and volunteer work (like Wikipedia) can be viable where there are non-negligible costs to cover. Grants and public funding can also help if it's a worthwhile cause. Some institutions/people benefit indirectly in recognition from putting information online - like universities, product support forums, or a security researcher writing up an investigation into a malware campaign. Could consider this a form of advertising, but the resources are being used in a productive way rather than just intentionally wasting time. Non-wasteful use of your time and computing resources are also fine by me, like torrent trackers that require you to maintain a minimum seed ratio. Google's CAPTCHAs are already sneakily giving you annotation work, just not paying for it. I'd claim federation also helps, in that services that ostensibly benefit from being one massive site (due to network effect) can actually be split up into smaller more feasible nodes. I use SDF's Mastodon/Lemmy instances for example, and host a Matrix server.

rchaud 8mo ago

Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future. Online ads now are a very different beast compared to what AdWords was from 2002-2007 - not dependent on full-spectrum surveillance through their own browser, their own mobile operating system, video streaming and cloud suite. Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
> Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future. Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself. > Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year. Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap. If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.
- hogwasher 8mo ago
  Google also takes the lion's share of the ad revenue. They're the reason youtube creators resort to sponsorships instead of relying on youtube's inbuilt ads. They even put ads on the videos of new youtube accounts and profit off them while telling said new accounts that they can't get any of that revenue for their own work until they hit Google's arbitrary threshold of subscribers/views. And they've been abusing the hell out of their chokehold monopoly on ads, via adsense, at every level of the system. Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads. Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.

allarm 8mo ago

That's an evil thing to say. No, that's not true.