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> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every single oth

> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every single other sector of the economy for all of recorded human history (I know, I know, who can remember that brief ~6000 year interlude between the Sumerians and the Internet!) The continue to work at your local dry cleaner, grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Really everything that doesn't require a browser. There are all sorts of moral, social, economic, and environmental reasons to be opposed to advertising. I keep AdBlock on by default because I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service.

cwyers 11y ago
The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online content, that doesn't hold. If I give away a copy of an article I just read in the New York Times, I still have a copy. It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)
- gameguy43 11y ago
  Don't copy that floppy!
  - Sideloader 11y ago
    Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      Did it though? Is music "better" or "worse" now?
      - coldtea 11y ago
        Justin Bieber and Nicky Manaj vs Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye.
        slowmotiony 11y ago
        Mainstream music sure does suck now, but music in general is better today than it ever was.
        coldtea 11y ago
        Music in itself, probably. But the "mainstreamity" (connecting a society and being a central cultural focus) is also a desirable attribute from music (from art in general), that is lacking today. That is, there's music that's great but not mainstream and music that's mainstream but not great. The sixties and seventies (up to the nineties maybe) had both. Modern good music has lost that, and everyone listens to good or even excellent music oblivious on his own little world and niche. (Oh, and I'm not waxing because I'm some Beatles-loving older guy -- I'm much younger and in fact I listen to tons of new music most people wouldn't even touch, from Nobukazu Takemura to Mount Erie, Four Tet, etc.). For me it's like great modern music is like some excellent Social Media site, with tons of features, great layout, speedy backends, nice UI et al, but where there are very few people using it. Yeah, in itself it might be a great web app, but where's the conversation and the social aspect?
        braythwayt 11y ago
        I was around for Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye, and your comparison is biased. You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. When looking backwards, you have an especial temptation to compare whatever is popular right-this-instant to whatever from back then has stood the test of time, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world. I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
        coldtea 11y ago
        >You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. Yeah, but both were in the top charts. Not that good stuff in the charts nowadays. >I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally. That comparison would also make my point, though. Bieber is for teenage girls, period, and bad at that. 60's music for teenage girls were the Beatles or at worse Petula Clark and the like.
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated by the ad-supported model. E.g. there are whole sites devoted to blatantly ripping off content from NY Times, WSJ, etc. and slapping their own ads on top.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall. The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.
    - amelius 11y ago
      But isn't it great that HN lets us know which articles are worth paying for?
  - tolmasky 11y ago
    Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines). For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.
eli 11y ago
That's a very different Internet from the one we live on today. I don't think most people want to pay per page view even if the system were relatively cheap and well implemented. I like that I can link to a page and typically trust that if the other person is on the Internet, they can view it.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Most people would not pay if the cost was fifty cents. But what if it was 0.1 cents? My desktop computer burns 0.1 cents in electricity every ten minutes.
  - calgoo 11y ago
    i would still not ever visit the site, and i would do everything in my power to rip the content and distribute it freely. I keep adblock on all the time now, only adding a few exceptions which i deem worthy. My problem is that i can not stand to have so much BS ads added to the text of the page. Sometimes i even use adblock to remove part of the webpages so i only get the content, when the author has made the page to messy. However, its not that hard to make a page acceptable, just don't add 10 ad boxes around and inside you article. Also don't add ads inside the text I'm reading, that is going to get blocked in seconds. Flash and image ads (especially ones that try to imitate page functions) are atrocities that a lot of times makes me leave a page and not visit it until months later when i forget why i was not visiting it. The only ads i approve are small, text based ads that are clearly marked as such and that don't interrupt the flow of information from the page. The moment i have to halt and reason if something is and ad or not, you get automatically blacklisted, and heavily so. On my home network i redirect several abusive ad networks DNS entries to an internal server that hijacks the ads and replaces them with jolly rogers :P Its really fun to see some pages with 8 jolly rogers smiling back at you giving me a evil grin thinking of the cents the page is loosing. [Edit: fixed spelling]
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      If you are ripping content and distributing it, aren't you engaging in copyright infringement? The argument for infringing copyright has never stood up. "Music wants to be free" etc. etc. is all a load of rubbish. "Food wants to be free" is another slogan we could all adopt but nobody would accept it because food has a cost, the same way that creating content has a cost.
ptman 11y ago
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- felipeerias 11y ago
  I see people posting that link over and over, as it it made some kind of valuable point. Do you realize that for this to work, you need to be permanently tracked by Google?
  - mike_hearn 11y ago
    Er, yes. What is your proposed alternative? Ads have the advantage of being anonymous and the "tracking" is optional (you can block cookies and see worse ads, if you like). The alternative is to pay for things. On the internet paying for things requires an account and (modulo bitcoin) a credit card, neither of which are anonymous or private. So far we cannot have our cake AND eat it. So you have to pick.
- dunkelheit 11y ago
  That's kind of a different thing. You do not pay google for their service (search). Instead you pay for content using google. Google sits in their favorite position of the all-tracking middleman and uses gathered information for serving you more and more creepy ads.
- castell 11y ago
  Ah, isn't Google (among others) one of the "problems"? * The lack of quality control of their ads displays a "download" button next to real download links and trick casual users to download malware. * Ads that follow you around and are so creepy that's certainly the number one reason to block ads. * Pay little money for ad impressions to the website owners. They prefer clicks over impressions, which leads to a lose-lose. They could improve the situation by doing the opposite of what they do at the moment. And Apple with its iAds is not much better, they would profit if more websites would cease to provide a mobile version and provide an iAs funded iOS app in their walled garden app store.
menzoic 11y ago
> I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service The wait over https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  Know what site I do not see participating there? Google.
cookiecaper 11y ago
It's not tenable for the user to create and maintain a subscription for every site they want to read on the internet. People may pay a central broker to manage these subscriptions, like they do with cable companies, but they won't create tens of individual subscriptions for the sites they like to read.

cwyers 11y ago

The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online content, that doesn't hold. If I give away a copy of an article I just read in the New York Times, I still have a copy. It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)

gameguy43 11y ago
Don't copy that floppy!
- Sideloader 11y ago
  Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    Did it though? Is music "better" or "worse" now?
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Justin Bieber and Nicky Manaj vs Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye.
      - slowmotiony 11y ago
        Mainstream music sure does suck now, but music in general is better today than it ever was.
        coldtea 11y ago
        Music in itself, probably. But the "mainstreamity" (connecting a society and being a central cultural focus) is also a desirable attribute from music (from art in general), that is lacking today. That is, there's music that's great but not mainstream and music that's mainstream but not great. The sixties and seventies (up to the nineties maybe) had both. Modern good music has lost that, and everyone listens to good or even excellent music oblivious on his own little world and niche. (Oh, and I'm not waxing because I'm some Beatles-loving older guy -- I'm much younger and in fact I listen to tons of new music most people wouldn't even touch, from Nobukazu Takemura to Mount Erie, Four Tet, etc.). For me it's like great modern music is like some excellent Social Media site, with tons of features, great layout, speedy backends, nice UI et al, but where there are very few people using it. Yeah, in itself it might be a great web app, but where's the conversation and the social aspect?
      - braythwayt 11y ago
        I was around for Sly and The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye, and your comparison is biased. You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. When looking backwards, you have an especial temptation to compare whatever is popular right-this-instant to whatever from back then has stood the test of time, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world. I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
        coldtea 11y ago
        >You can always take any two periods of time and compare the worst of X to the best of Y. Yeah, but both were in the top charts. Not that good stuff in the charts nowadays. >I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally. That comparison would also make my point, though. Bieber is for teenage girls, period, and bad at that. 60's music for teenage girls were the Beatles or at worse Petula Clark and the like.
hyperbovine 11y ago
Obviously, copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP for this model to work. But that is as separate issue which is not mitigated by the ad-supported model. E.g. there are whole sites devoted to blatantly ripping off content from NY Times, WSJ, etc. and slapping their own ads on top.
- cwyers 11y ago
  It's not about being able to control the distribution of their IP, it's that allowing users to redistribute their IP makes that IP more valuable for users. This isn't a universal truth of all content, but it's certainly a truth for stuff like news articles. Look at this very website. It's premised around sharing articles, blog posts, and such and allowing users to add their own commentary and see what others think about the same article. Every time a paywalled article comes up on the front page Hacker News, half the posts in the first 10 minutes are about how to get around the paywall or complaints about the paywall. The point is, for a user of Hacker News, an article he or she can post on this site and share with other HN users is simply more valuable than an article he or she cannot. And that's not just a local phenomenon, it's part of Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other smaller (sometimes ad hoc) online communities.
  - amelius 11y ago
    But isn't it great that HN lets us know which articles are worth paying for?
- tolmasky 11y ago
  Its a deeply interrelated issue. Personally, "copyright owners need to be able to control the distribution of their IP" is far more frightening to hear to me than anything about ads. Every "advancement" made for IP holders is usually incredibly customer hostile. We've seen international trade deals over this issue, we've seen fundamental rights degraded over this issue. I personally would prefer it not boil down to legal means of ensuring content owners get their content not ripped off (a last resort that rarely works), as opposed to a natural solution where the distribution method matches the natural inclinations of the users (people generally DON'T feel bad about stealing "content", but DO feel bad about stealing washing machines). For the record, ads existed before the internet too. Remember the radio? Remember PHYSICAL newspapers. Remember TV? Its kind of nice that the lower economic stratus of society has SOME access to all these services without being blocked by a paywall. In a paywall world, you walk into a library to use the internet because you don't have a computer, then are turned away from every site because you also don't have a credit card.

eli 11y ago

That's a very different Internet from the one we live on today. I don't think most people want to pay per page view even if the system were relatively cheap and well implemented. I like that I can link to a page and typically trust that if the other person is on the Internet, they can view it.

sliverstorm 11y ago
Most people would not pay if the cost was fifty cents. But what if it was 0.1 cents? My desktop computer burns 0.1 cents in electricity every ten minutes.
- calgoo 11y ago
  i would still not ever visit the site, and i would do everything in my power to rip the content and distribute it freely. I keep adblock on all the time now, only adding a few exceptions which i deem worthy. My problem is that i can not stand to have so much BS ads added to the text of the page. Sometimes i even use adblock to remove part of the webpages so i only get the content, when the author has made the page to messy. However, its not that hard to make a page acceptable, just don't add 10 ad boxes around and inside you article. Also don't add ads inside the text I'm reading, that is going to get blocked in seconds. Flash and image ads (especially ones that try to imitate page functions) are atrocities that a lot of times makes me leave a page and not visit it until months later when i forget why i was not visiting it. The only ads i approve are small, text based ads that are clearly marked as such and that don't interrupt the flow of information from the page. The moment i have to halt and reason if something is and ad or not, you get automatically blacklisted, and heavily so. On my home network i redirect several abusive ad networks DNS entries to an internal server that hijacks the ads and replaces them with jolly rogers :P Its really fun to see some pages with 8 jolly rogers smiling back at you giving me a evil grin thinking of the cents the page is loosing. [Edit: fixed spelling]
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    If you are ripping content and distributing it, aren't you engaging in copyright infringement? The argument for infringing copyright has never stood up. "Music wants to be free" etc. etc. is all a load of rubbish. "Food wants to be free" is another slogan we could all adopt but nobody would accept it because food has a cost, the same way that creating content has a cost.

ptman 11y ago

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

felipeerias 11y ago
I see people posting that link over and over, as it it made some kind of valuable point. Do you realize that for this to work, you need to be permanently tracked by Google?
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  Er, yes. What is your proposed alternative? Ads have the advantage of being anonymous and the "tracking" is optional (you can block cookies and see worse ads, if you like). The alternative is to pay for things. On the internet paying for things requires an account and (modulo bitcoin) a credit card, neither of which are anonymous or private. So far we cannot have our cake AND eat it. So you have to pick.
dunkelheit 11y ago
That's kind of a different thing. You do not pay google for their service (search). Instead you pay for content using google. Google sits in their favorite position of the all-tracking middleman and uses gathered information for serving you more and more creepy ads.
castell 11y ago
Ah, isn't Google (among others) one of the "problems"? * The lack of quality control of their ads displays a "download" button next to real download links and trick casual users to download malware. * Ads that follow you around and are so creepy that's certainly the number one reason to block ads. * Pay little money for ad impressions to the website owners. They prefer clicks over impressions, which leads to a lose-lose. They could improve the situation by doing the opposite of what they do at the moment. And Apple with its iAds is not much better, they would profit if more websites would cease to provide a mobile version and provide an iAs funded iOS app in their walled garden app store.

menzoic 11y ago

> I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service The wait over https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

hyperbovine 11y ago
Know what site I do not see participating there? Google.

cookiecaper 11y ago

It's not tenable for the user to create and maintain a subscription for every site they want to read on the internet. People may pay a central broker to manage these subscriptions, like they do with cable companies, but they won't create tens of individual subscriptions for the sites they like to read.